Hospitals use disparate systems to manage different health information. Health care workers may have to go to one system to look up registration and then go to another to look up lab work. It is not uncommon for hospitals to have 15 or more of such systems running. It should come as no surprise that managing medical information requires a lot of resources.

Amalga Unified Intelligence System 2009 (Amalga UIS) is an enterprise system designed to aggregate data from these disparate hospital systems. It listens to HL7 and other data formats across the hospital network and aggregates them in its database. With Amalga UIS, health care workers no longer have to go through multiple systems. They can now create customized views and software that interact with the aggregated data in one, consistent location.

As you can imagine, there’s huge potential in aggregating data from disparate hospital systems. For instance, it is possible to automatically flag patients that are due for new vaccines as opposed to a care manager manually going through files. Even in this simple, obvious example, a lot of time money can be saved. The potential is endless.

So far I have worked exclusively on consumer health solutions, including the Mayo Clinic Health Manager. But recently I have switched gears to work on implementing Amalga UIS in a world class hospital. I will be taking on an engineering lead role which brings a whole new set of challenges that I am not accustomed to. But I very much look forward to it.