Industry Players Align to Support Microsoft’s E-Health Strategy

Perot Systems and Philips Healthcare support Microsoft’s efforts to build interoperable e-health solutions.



CHICAGO (RPRN) 04/06/09 — Today at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2009 Annual Conference & Exhibition, Microsoft Corp. released an updated version of the Connected Health Framework (CHF) Architecture and Design Blueprint and additional solution accelerators in the Connected Health Platform (CHP) to help customers and partners deliver interoperable next-generation e-health solutions. In addition, leading healthcare solution providers Perot Systems and Philips Healthcare are supporting Microsoft’s commitment to deliver to customers e-health solutions built on the CHF and CHP strategy.

Microsoft Architecture and Technology for Healthcare Web site

“In today’s IT environments, heterogeneity is a reality, and we recognize that collaboration is critical to building and managing technologies that will work well for customers in these environments,” said Tim Smokoff, general manager of the Worldwide Public Sector Healthcare division at Microsoft. “CHF and CHP were born out of feedback and best practices from customers, partners and services providers such as Perot Systems and Philips Healthcare, and now as they enrich their offerings, we can further refine our tools to better respond to healthcare industry needs.”

Collaboration Provides Healthcare Solutions Now

Information technology is a key asset for governments and healthcare organizations around the world facing an uncertain economic climate and needing to implement cost-effective solutions. Microsoft’s CHF and CHP are free resources that healthcare organizations and partners are using to maximize the benefits and reduce the cost to design, build, deploy and operate solutions supporting the needs of patients, families, care professionals and healthcare providers.



Perot Systems is one of the largest providers of consulting, business process and technology-based solutions for global clients, including five of the top 25 U.S. health systems, more than 1,000 hospitals and 70 health insurance organizations, plus leading healthcare supply chain and retail pharmacy companies.

“Our healthcare clients expect the solutions we deliver to align with their cost and quality improvement requirements. This requires solutions that are adaptable, scalable and interoperable,” said Chuck Lyles, president of Perot Systems’ Healthcare Group. “We focus on developing e-health applications that adhere to these principles, and we were pleased that through the creation of CHF and CHP, Microsoft is offering the industry a means to collaborate on these best practices. As CHF and CHP continue to grow in content and adoption, the time to develop and the quality of e-health solutions that provide tangible business value should improve.”

“We believe that this is an essential approach, because most healthcare systems use hardware and software platforms acquired from multiple vendors over a long period of time,” Smokoff said. “By focusing on interoperability, our goal is to bring value to past and future IT investments by developing solutions that can work well in heterogeneous environments, evolve over time and serve the needs of healthcare organizations to improve patient care.”

Philips Healthcare recently introduced the IntelliVue Clinical Information Portfolio (ICIP) Critical Care solution. The solution streamlines clinical workflow, helps improve financial outcomes, and ultimately helps improve and save lives through facilitating compliance to evidence-based medicine guidelines for critical care. ICIP Critical Care is built on Microsoft technology and supports the guidelines outlined in the CHF Architecture and Design Blueprint guidance and the CHP manifestation.

“Providing clinicians with timely and relevant clinical decision support solutions that analyze and interpret patient data — when, where and how clinicians need that care-specific information — is key to improving clinical and fiscal outcomes,” said David Russell, vice president of marketing and chief marketing officer, Healthcare Informatics for Philips Healthcare. “Microsoft is making it easier for Philips to accelerate interoperability and ease of use by making available valuable guidance and tools as part of the Connected Health Platform that we can use and innovate upon to build solutions for our customers. With everyone on the same page, the opportunity to develop truly collaborative and innovative solutions exponentially increases.”

Updated CHF Provides More Comprehensive View of Industry, Additional Tools

The CHF provides solution architects both a business pattern and a reference architecture to design and build healthcare and associated systems in a platform-agnostic way. Since published in 2006, the Microsoft Connected Health Framework Architecture and Design Blueprint and the associated Connected Health Platform have been downloaded more than 20,000 times and are widely used by healthcare providers and independent software vendors in more than 30 countries.

Version 2 of CHF targets lifelong well-being and covers the full continuum of care — from the individual to health professionals, health institutions and payers. Because health is not about just hospitals, this version of CHF has been updated to do the following:

•	Support both social care and lifelong well-being scenarios.
•	Focus on the needs of families, care professionals, care providers and the funders of care services.
•	Include the use of federation methods for identity management, authentication, authorization and data integration.
•	Enable legacy applications to participate in the service-oriented architecture of the CHF.
•	Provide more use case examples and step-by-step design guidance.

Coupled with the revised guidelines of CHF, the Connected Health Platform helps health organizations maximize the benefits and reduce the cost of designing, building, deploying and operating the Microsoft platform and its infrastructure capabilities in their solutions or environment. CHP contains more than 55 architecture, design and deployment guides, tools and solution accelerators such as the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise Cross Enterprise Document Sharing reference implementation and the Common User Interface component.

More information and downloads of the Connected Health Framework Architecture and Design Blueprint and the Connected Health Platform guidance, tools and solution accelerators are available at http://www.microsoft.com/HealthIT.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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