NY Presbyterian Partners with Microsoft
New York Presbyterian Hospital recently selected Azyxxi, Microsoft's data management software tool, to improve its cross-organizational access to clinical, administrative and financial data.
Azyxxi was first deployed in 1996 in MedStar's Washington Hospital Center, Washington, D.C. However, this is Microsoft's first customer implementation of Azyxxi since it acquired the technology last year.
"We didn't conduct a conventional selection process," says Aurelia Boyer, CIO at New York Presbyterian Hospital. "Instead of forming a traditional provider-customer relationship, we have entered into a unique partnership with Microsoft. We're going to be testing and developing Azyxxi's capabilities in our facility, in the hopes of both benefiting from the process."
Boyer says she wants to make sure people understand that Azyxxi isn't a traditional EHR product. "EHR's are optimized for writing orders and inputting electronic notes, whereas Azyxxi facilitates data storage, data analysis, and the discovery of relationships among data across multiple sources," explains Boyer.
According to Boyer, NY Presbyterian already has data management intelligence system, but it is extremely "rough and ready. We've been using it more on the business side of things. I hope Azyxxi will give us an opportunity to conduct more data analysis on the clinical side," she says.
System implementation is still in its early days, and Boyer claims many challenges need to be overcome before the organization goes live. "This is still a development project; it's not like Cerner just comes in and tells us how to set up our lab system," she says. "Always with these kinds of projects, trying to map data into a repository is more difficult than you want it to be." Still, she hopes to go live in nine to 12 months.
When asked about the end goal of Azyxxi implementation, she says, "I would like to accomplish overall support of the hospital's strategic initiatives through better knowledge management. If I can offer better information, both about operations and clinical outcomes, with more robust data tools, then I will be satisfied," says Boyer.
New York Presbyterian, based in New York, has more than 2,335 beds and 5,000 physicians, and serves a population of more than 6 million people in the New York tri-state area.
