Collaboration Means One Click for Radiology, Medical Records

Royal Philips Electronics and Microsoft announced recently that they’re teaming up to give radiologists a more complete way to view patient data, including laboratory and pathology reports, medications, and admission, transfer and discharge data.

The collaboration will combine Microsoft’s data amalgamation platform, Amalga, with Philips iSite, PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System), giving radiologists a more comprehensive view of the patient’s history, without having to open up and log in to numerous programs. The companies note that being able to see the both digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) and non-DICOM data in one place, will save them time and effort.

This is the first commercial effort to bring relevant clinical data in the context of normal work flow within a PACS environment, according to Khan M. Siddiqui, MD, principal program manager at Microsoft. Officials plan to roll this solution out to the first early adopters in the next few months.

“Philips and Microsoft have a unique opportunity to give radiologists a new level of insight about the patient while reducing steps in their workflow,” said Scott Burkhart, vice president of marketing, Healthcare Informatics North America, for Philips Healthcare. “Enabling our iSite PACS and Amalga systems to work together can enhance analytics capabilities, enabling the radiology department to gain a deeper understanding of performance and identify opportunities to improve throughput and efficiency.”

For the collaboration, the two companies will jointly configure, market, and sell a product that allows radiologists using the Philips iSite Radiology viewer to click once within iSite to access the patient’s aggregated data in the Amalga program. Both programs are currently free-standing. Amalga aggregates patient data from multiple hospital IT systems. Philips iSite PACS is an image management program that allows any physician in the system to access full fidelity images within seconds.