One quarter of its healthcare solutions team is based here, writes Tony Waltham
Microsoft Corp, which made a major investment here last October with the acquisition of Bumrungrad Hospital's information system developer Global Care Solutions, is now looking to recruit software engineers to strengthen its development team here.
According to Microsoft's corporate vice president for its health solutions group Peter Neupert, the transition from Global Care Solutions (GCS) to become a part of Microsoft had gone smoothly and the software giant was now further developing GCS's Hospital 2000 product, now rebranded as Microsoft Amalga Hospital Information System (HIS).
Neupert said the hospital information system it had invested in here was "wonderful", but there were "items and capabilities" to be added to the product. Microsoft would continue to innovate around clinical information systems and work to establish its product, he added.
Amalga HIS is built around an electronic medical record (EMR) that includes complete patient and bed management, laboratory, medication management, radiology information system/picture archiving and communication system (RIS/PACS), pathology, financial accounting, materials management, and human resource systems.
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| Microsoft's corporate vice president for the Health Solutions Group Peter Neupert |
Neupert said that following the conclusion of the acquisition all employees had been retained and now wore Microsoft security badges, while benefiting from having access to Microsoft's development systems, Microsoft's infrastructure and access to other teams based in China and the United States.
The team here was large and comprised a quarter of Microsoft's healthcare solutions development team, with other members being based in China and the United States, he said.
In Bangkok last week on his way to a government leadership forum in Indonesia, Neupert said in an interview that he was here to stay in touch with his employees and with Microsoft's customer, Bumrungrad Hospital. Two staff members from the USA had been assigned to Thailand and Microsoft would be looking to assign one or two more to facilitate the integration, while recruitment of more staff here was now "number one on my list," he said.
Microsoft was adding people "as fast as we can," he said, noting that he was happy with the high quality of IT professionals here. Microsoft is looking for engineering talent - software test engineers, those with C++ and C# skills, hoping to hire many additional staff. Without giving precise numbers he said it would be in the double-digit range - but not more than 100.
Asked whether Microsoft had sold the product to any additional customers since the acquisition, he said Microsoft was not quite ready yet. "When we acquire a company we take some time to commercialise the product" and to integrate Microsoft's trustworthy computing principles, he said.
He expects an upgraded version of Microsoft Amalga HIS to ship around October this year, and the product, designed primarily for developing and emerging markets, will complement Microsoft Amalga, the Unified Intelligence System, based on a product formerly known as Azyxxi, brought in with another Microsoft acquisition.
A third Microsoft healthcare solutions group product called Amalga RIS/PACS is available as a stand-alone system as well as an integrated component of Microsoft Amalga HIS and this manages image workflow for radiologists in conjunction with patients' medical records.
Asked about Microsoft's HealthVault, a web platform where individuals can store their health data and records, Neupert said it was now in an "industry marketing phase."
HealthVault was a service where the value was related to the number of connections and Microsoft was working on building up the ecosystem, Neupert explained. He likened it to Windows 1.0 where there had been a whole new range of hardware, such as mice, and software (drivers and applications) that needed to be created.
He said that there were some 30 HealthVault applications up and working today, including scales and blood pressure cuffs that integrated with the platform, and Microsoft would make sure that the Amalga HIS could share data with HealthVault.
When health information was incomplete, such as when a patient's medical records were scattered across several hospitals, "bad things happen," Neupert said, such as the wrong drugs being prescribed or when there may be an allergy diagnosed elsewhere but the record of that was not available.
The HealthVault platform, introduced in October last year, is only offered in the United States at the moment but Microsoft is now considering extending it to two more countries this year, although Neupert has not yet decided which countries will be chosen.
However, in internationalising the HealthVault platform, there were other considerations since personal data was a sensitive issue in many countries, with some stipulating that data be kept on servers located inside their borders.
Neupert said that a citizen should be entitled to a copy of his data. He argued that "if we expect citizens to be accountable for their behaviour, then we must give them their data."
He said there were many challenges in pulling patient data together, since it was largely paper-based, while attitudes to sharing information varied, although in the US he said he believed that Microsoft had overcome resistance to sharing health information. The real question was the business model, and who would pay for the service?
Many patients today were frustrated with their healthcare givers, with some asking why accessing their healthcare records online could not be as simple as buying something online, booking an air ticket, or accessing financial services. People should demand more from their healthcare providers, he suggested.
We now see a beginning of an inflection point in moving towards what has been called Health 2.0, he said, and new opportunities could be created such as enabling the management of chronic conditions.
The other company aggregating health data online is Google Inc. and Neupert said he welcomed the competition. Our market shares are both zero, he said.
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