HealthVault and Amalga Provide Anywhere Access to Medical Data at Any Time

The NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital's myNYP.org website is an illustrative example of how Microsoft technologies can help healthcare organizations step into the digital era. The NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital has taken advantage of both the Redmond company's HealthVault and Amalga in order to put together myNYP.org. Now, via the health data record portal, patients are able to access their medical information, irrespective of location and time. At the same time, content centralized via the myNYP.org portal is available to hospital personnel, who can not only enjoy streamline access to a patient info, but also analyze the data as a whole.

“NewYork-Presbyterian is bringing health information technology into the 21st century,” Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft, revealed. “Just as consumers have been encouraged and enabled to manage their credit scores, myNYP.org sets a new standard for patient empowerment, helping them understand their care and gain stewardship of their medical information to use and share at their discretion. In time, this is likely to reduce the need for redundant paperwork and testing, make it easier for physicians to retrieve digital radiology images and other patient records, and reduce costs.”

Instead of dealing with disparate data silos, HealthVault and Amalga can be leveraged to centralize a variety of patient and healthcare data in a single system. The two technologies can be used for storing not only prescriptions, but also everything else from hospital discharge instructions, to laboratory results, radiology and EKG imagery, insurance data, emergency contacts, and even surgery reports.

Through HealthVault, Microsoft is offering a platform designed to permit end-users to manage their data in the Cloud via the web. At the same time, the Amalga unified intelligence system (UIS) can be used to bring together information related to clinical, administrative and financial processes, independent of the original “data silos” they are stored on.

“This technology not only gives patients access to their health information, but puts them in the driver’s seat, with complete control to take their information with them, add to it and share it with their family, other doctors and healthcare providers, and anyone they choose,” Dr. Steven J. Corwin, executive vice president and chief operating officer of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, added.