ATLANTA and REDMOND, Wash., Feb. 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ –Eclipsys Corp.® (Nasdaq: ECLP) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) today announced they have signed an alliance agreement to deliver the choice and flexibility that hospitals need and want to improve health information technology (HIT) efficiencies. Breaking with the tradition of closed, proprietary systems, the two companies will offer the market tightly integrated health IT solutions designed to make it easy for physicians, nurses and hospital administrators to gain insights from data aggregated from multiple clinical and financial systems across the hospital. The solutions also will support clinicians in acting upon a more complete health record.
“Eclipsys and Microsoft offer complementary strengths to healthcare enterprises looking to overcome the restraints caused by legacy health IT applications that block the strategic exchange and use of digital health data,” said Peter Neupert, corporate vice president, Microsoft Health Solutions Group. “Blending Eclipsys’ leadership in physician adoption and sophisticated clinical and decision-support workflows with Microsoft’s leadership in interoperability, data extraction, authentication and context management will open up new choices and opportunities for healthcare organizations needing to make the most from their existing IT infrastructure.”
Under the alliance agreement, the companies plan to integrate key components of Eclipsys’ industry-leading Sunrise Enterprise™ suite of integrated software applications with Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS), a data aggregation platform that integrates vast amounts of clinical, administrative and financial data from disparate information systems. The integration will serve to further enhance the analytic capabilities Eclipsys can provide to its clients, while making it easier for any healthcare organization to connect disparate data repositories, opening up a whole new paradigm of data analysis and clinical and financial uses.
“Clinicians have been frustrated by not having critical information available to them at the point of care because either the information resided on disparate systems or they were unaware that patient data was available,” said Philip M. Pead, Eclipsys’ president and chief executive officer. “The new federal regulations surrounding the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and achieving ‘meaningful use’ are a tipping point that will drive a rapid amount of change in how healthcare information is accessed. This important relationship with Microsoft marks the opportunity for clinicians to have access to patient data no matter where it resides, thereby improving the quality of care and lowering the cost.”
The alliance agreement leverages the two companies’ mutual market approach and vision for open technology platforms and builds upon Eclipsys’ long-term use of the Microsoft .NET Platform technology to deliver its software applications. The alliance with Microsoft coincides with Eclipsys’ evolution to open up its solutions platform technology beyond its client base. Eclipsys’ clients have long had the ability to build applications on the Eclipsys solutions platform, and since 2003, Eclipsys’ clients have created approximately 2,000 medical logic modules and ObjectsPlus/XA applications that work with Eclipsys software. The Microsoft agreement is part of Eclipsys’ open platform initiative, by which Eclipsys plans to expand its reach by working collaboratively with other industry participants to enhance interoperability, and enabling third parties to develop new applications that work natively with Eclipsys solutions.
“An open platform approach to healthcare information technology is expected to deliver much-needed relief to technology managers challenged to free up data trapped in old, proprietary systems,” said Aurelia G. Boyer, senior vice president and chief information officer, New York-Presbyterian Hospital. “We are longtime users of Sunrise Enterprise and an early adopter of Microsoft Amalga. Our work with Microsoft has helped us develop a more patient-centric approach by connecting the diverse health information systems from hospital to home to community. The combination of these solutions provides the opportunity to deliver faster, better data liquidity to enable us to improve clinical outcomes and less-costly mandatory public reporting.”
