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Orion Health Acquires Microsoft’s Former HIS Product; Companies Will Co-Market Offerings

October 16, 2011 News 1 Comment

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10-15-2011 8-11-18 PM

Orion Health, an independently owned software company that offers HIE, integration, and clinical portal products, will announce later today that its subsidiary, Orion Health Asia Pacific, has signed an agreement to acquire the Microsoft software suite formerly known as Amalga HIS and Amalga RIS/PACS. The companies will also announce that they will co-market Orion Health HIE and Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System (Amalga UIS) to health information exchanges and integrated delivery networks.

Amalga HIS was developed at Thailand’s Bumrungrad International hospital by Global Care Solutions and was acquired by Microsoft in October 2007. It  offered 50 clinical and administrative applications (including lab, medication management, RIS/PACS, electronic medical records, CPOE, clinical documentation, financial management, and HR management) that were used by seven Asia-Pacific hospitals. Microsoft announced that it was ceasing ongoing development of the product in July 2010, but would support existing customers for five years.

Orion will market the former Amalga HIS solutions as Orion Health HPM (Health Process Management.) According to Orion Health CEO Ian McCrae, “The addition of the Microsoft’s HIS assets is a natural extension of Orion Health’s portfolio of products that enable us to offer a complete solution to a wide range of hospitals and health organizations in Asia Pacific. The health sector in a number of Asia Pacific countries is overdue to make the transformative leap to the next generation of systems which integrate the complete healthcare ecosystem rather than siloing information in individual organizations or facilities.” The Thailand development center will become Orion Health’s fourth software engineering location.

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We spoke to Paul Viskovich, president of Orion Health North America, who said, “The initial focus of the product will be the Asia and Australasia market. We’re focusing on moving customers forward and expanding that and integrating that application suite with Orion’s current offering.”

The agreement also calls for the two companies to co-market Orion’s HIE and worfklow solutions along with Amalga UIS.

Paul Viskovitch told us, “We can provide the HIE solution requirements, with Amalga UIS providing the analytics and the business intelligence that they require. When you sell to the IDN space, they’re starting to look at an HIE as the foundation for an ACO in many cases. We’re starting to see the Amalga UIS component, with its business intelligence and analytics, as a key part of providing a solution.”

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Nate McLemore, general manager of business development, policy, and international sales of Microsoft’s Health Solutions group, told us. "We were hearing a lot from both customers and prospects that as we were in the HIE market, both in the community HIE as well as the enterprise-based HIE, that they loved the portal and workflow solutions that Orion provided, but also understood  the value that Amalga provided with a deep data platform and data analytics. Our customers and prospects were torn because we came at the problem from different directions. We spent the last several months working on how to address that and really go to market with a combined offering that gives customers the robust portal and workflow of health exchange through Orion, but also the data analytics and data platform capabilities of Amalga.”

We asked Nate McLemore how Microsoft might work with other potential partners like Orion. He said, “As Amalga moves more and more toward a data platform, we see working with partners to provide the data aggregation components of Amalga into the solutions they have.”

Orion Health, headquartered in New Zealand with a head USA office in Santa Monica, CA, offers an HIE platform, the Orion Health Hospital clinician portal, the Symphonia messaging and mapping tools, and the Rhapsody Integration Engine.



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Currently there is "1 comment" on this Article:

  1. Thanks for the update here and looks like Histalk is first with the news. I interviewed Nate and Kurt, the CEO from Bumrungrad back in October of 2009 at the Medical Tourism at the World Medical Tourism conference in LA. I did the interview video with my cell phone and had my friend run down from Fox studios to handle the phone:) It’s hard to talk and hold the phone at the same time and I used QIK, which is now owned by Skype and we all know that Microsoft has both of those now.

    It’s an interesting program, QIK, and as you well know, written interviews take time so I did a video:) It’s still up and around to see and it was done to talk about HealthVault being able to share records with the hospital. What was funny though is they didn’t expect a video to be done, but hey we live in high tech, right and it’s kind of fun to catch the high tech folks off guard here and there:)

    http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2009/10/interview-with-curtis-schroeder-ceo.html

    I think this actually makes sense though as there’s not a market here in the US with being the one stop solution and perhaps Orion might be able to open some doors. That hospital years ago used to be owned by Tenet and it has it’s own story behind it and the CEO came from Tenet. It’s hard keeping up on exactly who owns it now.

    I think when the hospital signed up with Amalga they were in dire need to get a good record system in place and from what I read it’s done a good job. There was another gentleman, Jim Goldberg who wrote a book about the hospital and the death of his son there, very upsetting to read and this was before they put Amalga in place. He sent me his book to read after seeing my blog post. You can search it on the web.

    After the interview was done I spent the rest of the day walking around talking to all the countries at the conference just to pick brains and see what it was all about. It was interesting and countries such as German, New Zealand, Israel. China and many others were there and brought their top folks. Who would waste a free one day pass to pick brains I said:)

    I’d like to do more of those types of interviews but unfortunately my Windows phone does not have QIK capabilities yet but hopefully soon. It broadcasts live and uploads to the web to view on the web and this was two years ago the the video capabilities have improved since then.







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