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Feature Story
Delivering Connected, People-Ready Healthcare IT

 

Early adopters of Azyxxi, a technology developed at Washington
Hospital Center to gain insights that improve business and patient
success, include 21 different hospitals at academic medical centers
and large health systems.

 

REDMOND, Wash., Aug. 30, 2007 — For years, hospitals and healthcare
systems have suffered from ‘siloed’ information residing in separate
and isolated systems. And for years Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group
(HSG) has been active in promoting standards in this area to help
bring those silos together, while carefully studying the market for
innovative technologies that could help healthcare providers address
this issue at the business solutions level.

Just over a year ago, HSG acquired a technology developed at
Washington Hospital Center called “Azyxxi” to do just that. Over the
past year, HSG has integrated the Azyxxi team, including developers,
designers and clinicians, and infused into its ongoing development the
valuable assets and insights they had developed from years of using
their technology to solve real-world challenges in the clinical
setting.

Today, as Microsoft’s new unified enterprise platform for healthcare,
Azyxxi is fundamentally changing the way healthcare is managed in the
organization, and delivered at the bedside.

Based on Microsoft .NET Framework, Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server
2005 software, Azyxxi addresses a core challenge of most healthcare
providers — integrating vast amounts of clinical, administrative and
financial information that flow in and out of various, disparate
information systems, and delivering it through role-based, optimized
user interfaces to analysts, laboratory technicians, nurses,
administrators and physicians.

“Azyxxi unlocks the value of a health system’s vast stores of critical
data, aggregates it from across all the organization’s existing
technologies, and provides unique access to transactions, details and
images,” says Steve Shihadeh, general manager of sales, marketing and
solutions for HSG. “From the inside out, Azyxxi was designed on .NET
and SQL Server for simplified deployment and support, high
availability, scalability and secure data storage.”

A Complex Enterprise

The healthcare IT ecosystem, says Shihadeh, is affected by a litany of
factors — most hospitals are not the only place patients receive care.
Separate records are typically kept at hospitals and physicians’
offices for the same patients. Lab work and other specialized services
may be outsourced to third parties. The hospital may accept hundreds
of different health plans for patient coverage, and they are obligated
to comply with an increasingly stringent regulatory and
standards-driven environment.

Each of the processes in that web of interactions is likely to be
supported by information systems from different vendors — making it
difficult if not impossible to coordinate data from across
departments, let alone stakeholders scattered across the industry.

“Healthcare is complicated, often times disjointed,” Shihadeh says.
“Hospitals, health systems and insurance plans, physicians,
specialists and consumers all interact in a very complex ecosystem.”

Yet, collecting all that information is critical to increasing the
quality of patient care, as well as the efficiency of the organization
in containing costs that are ultimately passed on to consumers.

“There have been several valuable investments and improvements in
health information technology,” Shihadeh says. “But rarely, if ever,
have health systems been able to tie together all the different
digital information sources they have, and that is the unique value
proposition of Azyxxi.”

According to HSG, Azyxxi is able to accomplish this industry-leading
level of integration because the technology that underpins the
offering is “data agnostic,” meaning Azyxxi will accept data from any
system, a key factor given today’s IT environment in healthcare.
Azyxxi can accept multiple forms of data including computer generated
data, text, images, video or scanned data.

“Azyxxi is extremely flexible in taking all that data, storing it in a
meta data format, and allowing rapid views of individual patients
built out with everything the system knows about them — really
enabling a physician to make informed decisions about patient care,”
Shihadeh says.

At the same time, the flexibility of the solution also allows
cross-patient, cross-organization views that give administrators clear
insight into business and operational impact, which is critical to
hospitals working off narrow profit margins.

But more important than profit margins, according to Shihadeh, is the
fact that a health system with that kind of information integrity will
be a safer place to be a patient, with better and more rapid
measurements about how the organization is performing.

“In effect they’ll have a command and control system over their
clinical operations, patient interactions, and the financial business
of the hospital or health system which allows them to be a more
efficient business, and deliver better care,” he says.

Early Adopters Exploring the Possibilities

Over the past several months, the Microsoft Health Solutions Group has
carefully gone to market and secured early adopter customers to engage
in collaborative development, to refine the product and help
commercialize it. During this process, the real potential of Azyxxi
has begun to emerge.

Early adopters include 21 different hospitals at academic medical
centers such as Johns Hopkins Health System and New York Presbyterian
Hospital; large health systems such as MedStar Health System and, just
announced today, Novant Health; and even the Wisconsin Health
Information Exchange, which will eventually tie together 25 different
hospitals in Southeastern Wisconsin.

“We have been very fortunate to have some real market leaders who have
seen the value in Azyxxi, and who are very excited to be working with
Microsoft to help us create a groundbreaking unified enterprise
platform for healthcare,” Shihadeh says.

One of those early adopters, New York Presbyterian Hospital and its
associated network, is using the system to unify its existing and
legacy information systems to create broad accessibility of its vast
quantities of information.

“As we’ve automated more and more of the processes within the hospital
and created more electronic data sources, our ability to mine and
utilize that data is becoming more of a priority,” says Aurelia Boyer,
senior vice president and chief information officer for the New York
Presbyterian Hospital and Healthcare system. “Making the data from
different systems available in a way that makes good management,
clinical and quality sense takes a lot of effort, and is a major goal
for an institution like ours. Giving people in the hospital ready
access to different kinds of data is priceless to us.”

According to Boyer, while each system has its own interface and can be
accessed efficiently for specialized queries, it’s often necessary to
correlate different types of organizational information, to analyze
trends and make decisions.

“Sometimes you want to bring the data together from different
systems,” she says. “HR staffing data could be viewed alongside
clinical data to balance our productivity, for example. As more
electronic data is available, there are more opportunities to cross
over those bridges. And you can’t just put the data together — you
have to model it in a way that has meaning.”

Boyer says the technology will help her organization target their
research projects going forward, as well as give them access to the
volumes of information contained in legacy information systems,
without needing to keep each system in operation.

“At some point you inevitably move on to a new system,” she says.
“When you do that, the historical data has to be kept somewhere so
that you don’t have to keep all the old systems running, which of
course would become a bigger and bigger issue as time moves on.”

When it comes to research, the system’s ability to unify information
and display it side by side will help the organization identify
patterns, correlations and populations for more detailed follow up.

“We could use it to identify patients with a particular set of
activities, whether it’s a diagnosis or a type of medication,” Boyer
says. “It will allow us to see what kind of population we have to do
research on, what data we have available, so we can decide what
research to do and how to get the data together.”

The flexibility demonstrated in New York Presbyterian’s different uses
of the technology is in evidence across the spectrum of early
adopters. Whereas New York Presbyterian is looking at Azyxxi as an
administrative tool to guide organizational decisions, for example,
Novant Health is working to implement Azyxxi in support of its
clinical operations.

“I’ve seen estimates that say a physician spends most of his or her
time collecting information about the patient before they deliver the
care,” says Rich McKnight, Novant’s CIO. “Our goal is to dramatically
reduce the amount of time in information gathering, and increase the
amount of time in taking care of the patient.”

Currently, Novant’s doctors must navigate several different systems to
access the entire scope of information on a patient — lab results are
loaded onto PDAs and printed on paper charts. A centralized data
collection system presents patient background information on desktop
computers.

“Doctors have to look three or four different places to get the
complete picture on a patient,” McKnight says. “And the more
complicated someone’s medical situation is — the more input they need
to make a good decision for that patient — the more places they have
to go and look. Azyxxi addresses this problem, and is a creative way
to bring all the information together into one screen.”

According to McKnight, doctors like the fact that by bringing all this
together through Azyxxi, they have lab results, patient demographic
information, radiology results, doctors’ notes, prescriptions and
other information in one place. And with repeat patients, Azyxxi can
include all of the prior records as well — data in Azyxxi can go back
as far as patient records do. Access to radiology images in particular
is a unique feature of Azyxxi that brings great value to doctors as
they move through their rounds.

“You can see a better, more complete history of the patient in one
place in one screen,” McKnight says. “All of that information has been
gathered for each doctor to look at and take better care of patients.
We certainly have many opportunities down the road subsequent to our
phase one implementation, but phase one is entirely focused on doctors
and improving clinical care.”

While Novant and New York Presbyterian are still rolling out the
technology and exploring what it can do, Shihadeh is finding
excitement for Azyxxi growing in health systems across the United
States. At MedStar for example, he says, one physician executive uses
the product to get the pulse of her organization each morning —
patient census, ER workloads, nursing distributions and daily
projections — and then uses it in her other job, as a physician, to
understand each patient’s condition and history before she enters the
room to consult with the patient or another doctor.

“Whether I’ve talked to chief executives, chief medical officers,
chief information officers, Azyxxi allows them to leverage current
investment, and gives them insights they never had before,” he says.
“You see a powerful impact with a tool like this, a system that is
able to turn the organization’s existing data into business-critical —
and life-critical — information. It has the ability to improve
clinical care and patient outcomes, as well as the organization’s
bottom line.”

As the product moves into its second year in Microsoft’s portfolio,
HSG is focused on increasing its functionality using feedback from the
early adopter program, benefiting from around-the-clock development
delivered through the establishment of a new development center in
China.

With that kind of resource dedication alongside the technology’s
already impressive flexibility and power, look for Azyxxi to make
deeper inroads across the health ecosystem in its second year at
Microsoft and enable even more transformative approaches to business
success and patient care.

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(503) 443-7070

 

Related Items

 

Press Release:

Novant Health Selects Microsoft Azyxxi to Improve Healthcare Delivery
- August 30, 2007

 

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