Among the first pediatric healthcare centers nationwide to adopt Amalga, Seattle Children's will now be able to consolidate and view valuable patient data currently locked in core IT systems.

SEATTLE and REDMOND, Wash., Sept. 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Seattle Children's Hospital has selected Microsoft Amalga, the unified intelligence system, as its data platform to provide clinical staff members with real-time, consolidated views of comprehensive patient information. Specifically, Amalga will provide researchers at Children's with a single view of electronic data needed to identify trends and relevant patients for clinical trials, as well as enable its clinical staff to better manage hospital operations, such as anticipating a patient's length of stay.

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'Currently, our clinical and research staff requests information from a single data department, so it can often take days or weeks to get the information back to the person requesting it,' said Drex DeFord, senior vice president and chief information officer at Children's. 'Because Amalga will allow staff members from all departments to pull the information they need more quickly and in real time, it will allow us to make full use of the patient data stored throughout our organization. We're thrilled to be one of the first Children's healthcare organizations in the nation to join the Amalga early-adopter family.'

Children's staff requires a timely and complete picture of the length of and reason for a patient's stay in order to address throughput issues. Amalga will serve as the foundation for a real-time hospital information 'command center,' providing administrators with a much-needed dashboard view of how resources are being used. As a result, staff members can make real-time, informed decisions about patient, personnel and facility needs.

'Since multiple data systems can be integrated into Amalga, we hope to streamline data management, eventually realigning resources to support consolidated data management and reporting instead of maintaining multiple, nonintegrated data sources,' DeFord said.

Children's will also use Amalga to create a centralized research data warehouse to avoid the proliferation and entrenchment of numerous departmental databases.