Feb 22, 2011 13:39 GMT  ·  By

Community hospitals will be able to take advantage of a new Software-as-a-Service solution developed by Microsoft and Dell in collaboration with Stellaris Health Network.

Available through a subscription-based model, the new offering will be affordable, Microsoft promises, and offer a comprehensive set of capabilities from analytics to informatics, but also business intelligence (BI).

Essentially, Dell will take advantage of Microsoft’s Amalga platform, integrating it with its own cloud infrastructure and providing the result to community hospitals as a hosted online service.

“In a highly dynamic healthcare landscape, hospitals of all sizes are challenged by a lack of timely access to health data stored in their enterprise technology systems, which has a direct impact on timely decision-making and, ultimately, the quality of care,” explained Peter Neupert, corporate vice president, Microsoft Health Solutions Group.

“With Dell and Stellaris, our goal is to offer a set of solutions that makes it simple for small and midsize hospitals, which typically don’t have extensive IT departments, to readily access and analyze the data they need to identify gaps in care quality and take the right steps to make measurable improvements.”

The Stellaris Health Network's organizations will act as the foundation members for the new SaaS health offering from Microsoft and Dell.

Stellaris is made up of Lawrence Hospital Center, Northern Westchester Hospital, Phelps Memorial Hospital Center and White Plains Hospital, hospitals which will be involved in building the new solution.

“Uniting our companies’ complementary strengths in healthcare software, IT services and enterprise-class server systems, Dell and Microsoft are uniquely positioned to bring to market new modular healthcare solutions aimed squarely at the needs of small and midsize hospitals,” added Berk Smith, vice president, Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences Services.

Plans are already in motion to introduce a pilot of the upcoming solution at four of the Stellaris hospitals. The health organizations will begin embracing the SaaS offering in March 2011.