What the @#$% is an Azyxxi?

There’s been a lot of scuttlebut around Microsoft's acquisition of a technology (and company) known as Azyxxi from MedStar Health in Washington, D.C. To clarify, Azyxxi (according to their website) is "a unified health enterprise platform that helps improve cross-organizational access and insight to clinical, administrative, and financial data."

What Pain Points Azyxxi will address in Healthcare IT?
o Improvements are needed in clinical information acquisition, storage, retrieval, sharing, and presentation—an important goal in any health care strategy.
o As we move toward the future, an important first step is simply to get all existing data into the hands of clinicians and other health care professionals.
o In today's hospital enterprise, already-existing information may not readily be available when and where it is needed.
o Best-of-breed systems lack integration, creating an environment in which information is hard to access and harder to aggregate for optimal value.
o Clinicians and administrators need access to data that enables the most informed decisions around patient care and operational performance.

The Microsoft Azyxxi solution
Health care professionals could benefit from the ability to quickly pull this data into a consolidated and customized view, to help enable informed decisions and peak performance. Azyxxi focuses on improving clinical information acquisition, storage, retrieval, sharing, and presentation. Azyxxi sits across most current best-of-breed systems in the hospital. It aggregates patient data so that clinicians can get an instant picture of the data in the hospital's systems. There's no waiting for archived information. Azyxxi aggregates relevant data for one, nearly instantaneous, view. Healthcare workers can maximize the value of information to help make the most informed decisions. Informed decisions can help save your business money and—most importantly—help save patient lives.

Architecture
A hospital or health system typically has a configuration of best-of-breed IT systems that operate independently of each other. One system controls imaging, another manages emergency room systems, yet another addresses operating room management and the list goes on. Azyxxi sits across most current best-of-breed systems in the hospital and aggregates patient data so that clinicians can get an instant picture of the data in the hospital's systems at any time. The information is viewed and analyzed according to the individual needs of the user. Azyxxi customizes the results to help enable the most informed decisions and best patient care.

Existing IT State
You have hard-working, disparate information systems that cannot coordinate to feed you an integrated view of results. This results in frustrated clinicians and administrators who may not have access to all the data they need. Traditional enterprise-wide health IT systems have evolved from transactional systems. In these systems data is organized and locked in strings that have been created to resolve a specific transaction request. System requests are slowed down by the inability to search on individual data components, as the search request must move through all the transaction codes in the system to identify the relevant data pieces—an inefficient process in a business that may depend on timely decisions to help save patient lives.

Why Microsoft Azyxxi is different?
It's seemingly built on a federated-database model similar to MEDSEEK. Your clinicians and administrators need integrated and customized views and analysis of clinical, financial and administrative data. Azyxxi was developed as a solution to data storage and search issues, integrating across multiple best-of-breed health IT systems. It does not replace them.

Results for your health organization
Data is divided into multiple components, clearly identifiable within each transaction. This means the data can be re-organized into multiple buckets to answer a wide variety of queries. Search is fast because it does not require scrolling through thousands of transactions to source the data. Detailed queries and analysis become easier the more you use Azyxxi, as you increase your potential to leverage existing criteria sets and views.

Azyxxi's flexible federated architecture means that it can be customized any number of ways, depending on the user's needs. Much like competitor Medseek's "eConnect" platform, views and workflows can be optimized over time as workflows evolve, making it increasingly valuable the more that it is used. For more information on Microsofts Azyxxi solution, please visit:http://www.azyxxi.com