Philips, Microsoft Collaborate To Streamline Radiologist Workflows

Royal Philips Electronics and Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a collaborative endeavor wherein the latter’s iSite PACS will be integrated with the Microsoft Amalga data aggregation platform. Intended to streamline radiologists’ workflow, the collaboration builds upon an existing commitment by the two companies to work together to connect technologies that will help yield faster delivery of meaningful health information, improve healthcare efficiency and productivity, and reduce development and infrastructure costs, according to a jointly issued statement. An integration of the two technologies will enable radiologists to view complete sets of DICOM and non-DICOM data, reducing the time radiologists currently spend probing separate, disconnected information systems to build a comprehensive view of patient history and allowing them to focus more time on case review, analysis, and diagnostics. 

Under the agreement signed by the companies, Philips and Microsoft will collaborate to configure, market, and sell a connected solution that enables radiologists using the Philips iSite Radiology viewer to make a single click within iSite to access a patient’s clinical data aggregated, delivered, and displayed within Microsoft Amalga. Today, in order to view a patient’s labs, medications and other data, a radiologist must start multiple clinical IT applications, log into each one, navigate to the specific patient and then click through multiple screens in each application to build a complete mental picture of the patient’s history. With the connected solution, Microsoft Amalga will aggregate patient data from the hospital’s multiple IT systems and deliver a unified view to the radiologist, eliminating the need to navigate separate applications.