Microsoft announced today that Azyxxi, their big foray into the healthcare information market, has landed a significant coup: it will be adopted by the St. Joseph Health System, a large West Coast based community hospital network with sites in California, Texas, and New Mexico. This is the largest deployment of the recently acquired Azyxxi system to date and a signficant step forward for Microsoft in the as yet untapped healthcare Information system market.

I haven't had an opportunity to look at the software personally yet but by all accounts it is an impressive step toward amalgamating, securely, all the various types of patient data generated in the healthcare environment. Other electronic charting systems I have worked with are impressively byzantine in implementation and cost and limited in their ability to integrate with other systems. The word on the street about Azyxxi is that it has few of these failings; like many Microsoft products (although it was developed independently at Washington Hospital Center by Medstar Health and acquired only a year ago) it integrates impressively with a variety of sources of information. Because it uses commodity hardware and software, and because it doesn't propose to replace every existing system it is going to integrate, the implementation costs can be substantially lower than for many specialized healthcare information systems. The same advantage accrues in lower operating costs and higher efficiency.

I'm personally pretty excited at Microsoft stepping into healthcare; whatever their other failings, I believe the company has the effect in markets of lowering costs and generally raising the standards of performance and ease of use. Up to this point, the norm in healthcare IT has been extraordinarily expensive, legacy applications from a handful of vendors who have exhibited limited innovation or integration. Whether Azyxxi is particularly successful on its own or not, I believe that it will force other vendors in that market to improve their own game, and thereby do us all a great service in one of the few areas where it really matters.