And now Microsoft

Well just as I’m busy working on a brief for my cousin James on the shift handover idea I see at the other end of the innovation specturm Microsoft has recently acquired Azyxxi. And as Bill Crounse, Healthcare Industry Director at MS posts in his ‘Health blog on 10’ on 26 July:


“The Azyxxi solution came about, as most good things do, out of sheer frustration.  One of the physician developers told me his hospital had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on clinical systems the doctors working there couldn’t or wouldn’t use.  Using commodity software and the latest technologies from Microsoft, they built a solution that aggregates clinical information from all the disparate systems in use..Furthermore, the solution opens up ways to take advantage of the information worker tools, and communication and collaboration technologies our company is famous for.  Frankly, I sometimes think better solutions to facilitate communication and collaboration in healthcare are perhaps more important to the industry and to patient safety than tools that simply help us assimilate and document patient information.”

Very interesting. Nicely, his blog includes one comment which ends with the words: “Good luck – the guys at NHS in the UK really need to talk to you about this…”. I guess I better get on with my own weblog based idea pronto.

What the URL is that?/2

Read through the City University literature on shift handover applications, and then by luck came across a social software company which already produces blog software for shift handover! Nice coincidence. I know this is an unusual way to investigate product viability but I’ll just follow it a little further I guess:

“OPERATIONS LOG Operations teams often work on a continuous basis or on a project or issue over time. To be efficient and minimize waste, information must be transferred and issues must not be overlooked. Traction provides a way to log status, raise alarms, and tighten communication across stakeholders or shifts. Shift team members and managers can receive a summary email detailing the last 8 or 24 hour period (as desired) when they start their day. It is simple to raise, prioritize, or track issues, dive into detail on activities and make comments to report progress against any issue or objective.”