Microsoft Buying Sentillion in Health Care Play

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Microsoft said Wednesday it will buy private health-care software firm Sentillion and integrate it with its Amalga line of health management software.

The move is intended to enable health-care professionals to improve patient care by providing higher levels of integration among hospital and other care systems.

“Combining Sentillion’s products with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) will make it easier for healthcare professionals to deliver better patient care by streamlining access to multiple IT applications and patient data,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

However, Microsoft did say that it will continue to sell and support Sentillion’s products to both new and existing customers.

The sale is expected to close early next year. Sentillion will continue to maintain its headquarters in Andover, Mass.

Longer term, Microsoft said it plans to invest in the evolution of its growing portfolio of healthcare products, including Sentillion.

Microsoft has been gradually building a base of health-care automation solutions for the past several years, although activities started picking up in late 2007.

Under the leadership of Peter Neupert, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group, the company launched its HealthVault free online storage and retrieval service for consumers’ medical and health records in October 2007.

Less than a month later, Microsoft acquired the software used to run the largest private hospital in Southeast Asia from
Global Care Solutions (GCS), a privately held company based in Bangkok, Thailand.

In February 2008, the company consolidated those and other acquisitions into
the Microsoft Amalga Family of Health Enterprise Systems.

Then in June 2008, Microsoft started a pilot project with Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest not-for-profit health plan, to enable data transfers between consumers’ medical records and HealthVault.

On the care givers’ side, the purchase of Sentillion and its integration with Amalga aim to strengthen the tools Microsoft offers to health-care professionals.

“Microsoft Amalga UIS … integrates vast amounts of clinical, administrative and financial information that flow in and out of disparate information systems, and tailoring that information for use by physicians, analysts, laboratory technicians, nurses and administrators,” Microsoft’s said.

“By combining Sentillion’s context management and single sign-on technologies with Amalga UIS … Microsoft aims to give clinicians new insight about patients in real time and enable them to perform the appropriate task with unprecedented speed,” the company added.

Microsoft said that Sentillion’s software is used by more than 1,000 hospitals, representing 160 healthcare organizations.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.