When I first mentioned Microsoft's foray into healthcare information systems, brought on by the purchase of a system called Azyxxi which was purchased from Medstar Health in 2006 and has since been rebranded "Amalga" (I'm sure this was subject to much focus testing, but to me it's trading one incomprehensible name for another... I suppose "amalga" is supposed to evoke "amalgamation" and other coherent thoughts, but we'll get to that in a bit), the focus was definitely on healthcare. It was a hospital information system, an innovative one which would tie together (amalgamate! hey, cool) information from a variety of disparate existing systems in the organization and make all the information available neatly and cleanly in a unified interface. Basically, it promised to provide a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) before SOA was cool, and without having to do much of the heavy lifting at the service level. A sort of top-down SOA approach that seems to have been ignored or discredited in most SOA circles since.

I noticed a couple of press releases yesterday, though, talking about this Amalga thing and noting its adoption by University of Washington Medical Center and Seattle Children's Hospital, and on the first read through, I didn't recognize what they were talking about. Instead of a "Hospital Information System" it's a "Unified Intelligence System." Eventually they mentioned how it would integrate existing systems in such a way as I recognized Azyxxi beneath the surface, but that just made me curious as to the change in focus.

Reading more on the Amalga site it starts to make more sense... their "Unified Intelligence System" is a convoluted way of saying "Hey, we have stuff that can do search well, too! We don't need to buy Yahoo, we already bought this other stuff that we had forgot about but turns out to work great at organizing and indexing information, and as soon as possible we're gonna rip out all the medical underpinnings and try to make some real money with it!"

That's my take, anyway. The interesting thing is that they may be right; it's apparent that Amalga is actually a capable and useful system, and if it can work in healthcare, it could be a tremendous asset in other industries as well. It's not pure search, nor is it "real" SOA, but it may be close enough to both those things to be useful in a way that will make purists scoff but ordinary users swoon.