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. With Amalga, Children's will be able to quickly compare a wide range of data, such as geographic and demographic information.

'Through its innovative research center and dedication to high-quality operations, Children's is playing a critical role in ensuring the well-being and quality of care for children throughout its region,' said Steve Shihadeh, vice president of the Health Solutions Group at Microsoft. 'Amalga will enable Children's to make use of data in ways that have never been possible before.'

Amalga addresses a common and critical challenge of healthcare providers by integrating vast amounts of clinical, administrative and financial information that flow in and out of disparate information systems, and tailoring that information for use by researchers, physicians, analysts, laboratory technicians, nurses and administrators. Amalga takes advantage of health enterprises' investments in existing health IT solutions and makes it possible for the entire organization to gain quick access to data and turn that information into critical knowledge that facilitates better decision-making and improved patient outcomes.

Amalga is in use at other renowned U.S. healthcare institutions, including District of Columbia Primary Care Association, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Johns Hopkins Health System, Novant Health, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, St. Joseph Health System and the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange.

About Seattle Children's Hospital

Consistently ranked as one of the best children's hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report, Children's serves as the pediatric and adolescent academic medical referral center for the largest landmass of any children's hospital in the country (Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho). For more than 100 years, Children's has been delivering superior patient care and advancing new treatments through pediatric research. Children's serves as the primary teaching, clinical and research site for the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The hospital works in partnership with Seattle Children's Research Institute and Seattle Children's Hospital Foundation. Together they are Seattle Children's, known for setting new standards in superior patient care for more than 100 years. For more information visit http://www.seattlechildrens.org.