Microsoft’s Acquisition of Azyxxi

I mentioned in a previous post on Windows Vista’s Voice recognition that I needed to comment on Microsoft’s aquisition of Azyxxi showing their interest in entering into the Healthcare industry as a software provider. I still haven’t had much time to read abouy that Azyxxi is going to do for the healthcare industy. When I read the announcement of the purchase of Azyxxi and the following post by Dr. Bill Crounse (he works for Windows) on Health Blog, I made the following comment:

I agree that this is a very interesting play into HealthcareIT for Microsoft.

Neil Versel reported:
“”Microsoft sees it as applicable to clincians and integrated delivery networks, not just a hospital system,” Washington Hospital Center ED chair Mark Smith, M.D., said at a press teleconference this morning.”

One thing I don’t understand is how this is going to affect anyone but hospitals and large group practices. If it can’t apply to small practices then it won’t have nearly the effect on healthcare that people are describing.

Maybe you could help me understand how this will apply to the small doctors offices.

Dr. Bill Crounse responded:

First and foremost, the system was built by doctors, for doctors. While it does not replace existing HIS/CIS systems, it does make them more useful by freeing the data locked up in disparate systems. It provides clinicians with an intuitive, extremely responsive way to view patient data. It is truly a world-class iteration for the era of knowledge-driven healthcare.

To the extent that data can be normalized, assembled, and securely distributed via web services, clinicians in all kinds of settings large and small, will have access to information that has previously been unavailable or locked up in silos. Patients could benefit as such systems populate their personal health record. The scenario I envision isn’t all that different than the way my financial services institutions populate information in my brokerage or retirement accounts.

Granted, this must play out in stages and we have a lot of work to do. But I am hopeful that we are on the right course, for clinicians and the patients we care for.

I’m still not catching the vision of how Azyxxi works. It really sounds like this is only going to beneficial to hospitals. I guess I could see a doctor’s office possibly getting access to information about hospital visits aggregated using Azyxxi. However, I don’t think that is the intent of this product. Please correct me if I’m wrong. So far everything I’ve read has only deal in vague details about how Azyxxi is able to aggregate disparate data. This is much easier said than done. Let’s see what you’re talking about.

One comment that did catch my attention was by Mike C:

“1/8th of a second access time to data housed within a 13TB database though… that is quite impressive =)!”

Despite catching my attention I’m still not sure how this applies to a doctor’s office. A doctor with 13 TB’s of data has their scanner resolution set way too high.

I am interested in listening to the Microsoft and Azyxxi audio cast. I think I’ll download it to my iPod tomorrow.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • Imagine being able to pull up a patient’s medical record on the web!!!!!!!!!!! Imagine, only needing the patient to sign in with a password as they enter your office; or to give you a time-limited access for a consultation visit or a permanent access for a primary! I read all this stuff as a former MBA, CPA now wanting to be solo as an MD and I think: look at all these folks trying to get me to support them by coming up with fancier, trickier, more complicated and less needed rules, regulations, etc. I get depressed at wanting quality while small. As a resident we wanted small patient databases on our PDAs. Then there was HIPPA with all its amazing intent perverted to such a different outcome. Now I am just trying to keep to the KISS principle in order to happily care for some, but not too many, patients. All these fancy and expensive extras…and then…something about what Dr. Crounse wrote allowed me to dream…just imagine how much better we could care for patients…how much better we could could happily live our lives…if the IT folks handled things OUTSIDE of our offices out on the web and allowed us to access all the patient’s medical records…maybe just with a patient’s fingerprint…that would work even in the ER when they came in comatose…we would know they were on Coumadin…we could see the last INR and know to check another and reverse after trauma…we could see that they just had surgery 3 weeks ago and not thrombolyse intravenously…we could save all kinds of money and time running tests to make up for poor or no history that is so very common on admission to hospital…in consulting offices where we see new patients all the time, we would not have to beg the referring doctors’ offices for records or try to decipher the patient’s poor medical understanding…everything would be SOOOOOOOOO much faster and more efficient…I can dream…maybe Dr. Crounse and Microsoft can actually accomplish…I would put in more hope if my Windows never crashed or slowed down or ran 75% as stably as DOS used to…

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