Following a two-year pilot that included volunteer recruitment for clinical trials, the sprawling UW Medicine system has committed to Microsoft's Amalga Unified Intelligence System by way of a perpetual license. It will use the data-aggregation platform for translational research and for analyzing clinical trial data.
The large-scale medical system--which includes the University of Washington School of Medicine, Harborview Medical Center, UW Medicine Neighborhood Clinics, UW Medical Center, and others--hopes to give its researchers faster and more complete access to electronic data stored across the member organizations. During the pilot, UW Medicine researchers worked with the bioinformatics group on projects to collect study data and link it to clinical data for statistical analysis, in addition to subject recruitment.
The planners also envision giving researchers the means to access, search and perform analyses on data stored in UW medical record systems, UW research laboratory systems and study data management systems.
Amalga is also the basis of another recently reported Microsoft agreement, this one with Norton Healthcare. Norton is using the software giant's Health Vault in addition to the UIS platform, helping users aggregate and mine data.
And as reported in August, contract researcher PPD began working with Microsoft on an Amalga-based system for managing risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) programs.
- here's the Microsoft release