Microsoft HUG--Wish you were here

Today was the launch of the annual Microsoft Healthcare Users Group conference in Redmond.  If you are not among the several hundred attendees, we wish you were here.

The Redmond Microsoft HUG meeting is US-focused by design.  We kicked off the event with an opening keynote by Microsoft Health and Life Sciences General Manager, Steve Aylward.  Steve did a nice job summing up our US health industry business and our focus and strategy across the various health groups at Microsoft.

There were many memorable presentations during the day, but perhaps one of the best was that delivered by Dr. Edward Barthell of the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange.   The Exchange is one of our early adopter customers of Microsoft's Unified Health Intelligence System known as Amalga.  Dr. Barthell provided the audience of developers, IT pros, clinicians and industry executives with ample evidence on the value to be gained from a regional health information data exchange and the real-time analysis of that data; a capability enabled by Microsoft Amalga.  Time and time again he illustrated how the system is helping to coordinate care, improve patient safety and contribute to higher care quality among the connected emergency facilities in Wisconsin.  Whether it is being able to appropriately respond to and triage patients to area hospitals based on real-time bed capacity, reassuring public health officials regarding the prevalence of diarrheal illness in the community after local flooding, or helping ER physicians avoid giving drugs to patients that might have an allergy to that drug;  Amalga is proving to be the clinicians' and the patient's best friend.   

My colleague Sean Nolan, chief software architect for Microsoft HealthVault, also gave a standing room only presentation.  Sean provided developers with a progress report on Microsoft HealthVault and supplied information on how to work with the platform to drive new consumer-focused health applications and services.

As Dr. Barthell's final slide suggested (with a bit of Wisconsin humor) the future for Health IT is very bright indeed.

Amalga and HealthVault; two solutions that are helping bring order to the chaos of disconnected data in healthcare. 

Bill Crounse, MD    Senior Director, Worldwide Health   Microsoft Corporation

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