The Amalga Family of Health Enterprise Systems is nothing more than an extensive collection of health information solutions designed to bring to the table clinical, operational and financial capabilities. Microsoft is gearing up to showcase the Amalga lineup of products at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2008 health IT industry's conference, scheduled to take place between February 24-28 in Orlando.

"One of the healthcare enterprise's biggest issues is that providers and executives can't access patient information when, where and how they need it," said Steve Shihadeh, general manager for Microsoft's Health Solutions Group. "Microsoft's Amalga products offer proven solutions that bring together information from across the healthcare enterprise into one, easily accessible view. In fact, the name 'Amalga' is based on the Latin word 'amalgama,' meaning to bring together different elements."

Microsoft has packed under the same umbrella brand a total of three products: Amalga, Amalga Hospital Information System (HIS) and Amalga RIS/PACS. In this context, Amalga is essentially the evolution of Azyxxi, and an illustrative example of Unified Intelligence Systems. UIS is a category of software products set in place to enable information centralization. In health systems featuring multiple IT solutions, Amalga will deliver a new level of data capturing, consolidation, storing accessing and presenting. At the same time, Amalga Hospital Information System is based on Hospital 2000, and is aimed at emerging markets around the world as a hospital information system.

Amalga RIS/PACS is "the new version of the product formerly known as GCS Amalga is now available as a stand-alone system as well as an integrated component of Amalga HIS. The integrated architecture means that a radiologist can use a single application to manipulate and study images and access the patient medical record. The workstation interface is optimized for radiologist workflow, including support for predefined templates, an intuitive report editor and voice recognition capabilities," Microsoft added.