Microsoft Rebrands its Healthcare Software and Introduces it to European Markets

Microsoft is now offering its Amalga health-care software in Europe.  now Known as Microsoft Amalga has many components, from PACS solutions, Managing patient care records to tracking research projects and finance department tasks.

Microsoft Amalga  was previously known as Azyxxi which was acquired from General Datomics and  MedStar Health in 2006. This was positioned as a health intelligence Software.

But the New Amalga is more powerful and it bring the synergies of various microsoft acquisitions. It now Has a Hospital Information System (HIS) earlier known as Hospital 2000 “hospital information system for developing and emerging markets acquired from the  Thai developer Global Care Solutions (GCS) in 2007.

Amalga also boast of a Microsoft Amalga RIS/PACS earlier  known as GCS Amalga.

Amalga is being used by eight hospitals in MedStar Health’s network, which covers the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore areas, as well as Johns Hopkins Hospital, among others.

What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft?

from the Google Blogoscope.

Fun apart I think the new Windows Live Mail (the Outlook style desktop software) is a good tool especially with its Feed Reader features and windows common feed list. Equally good is the Attensa Feed reader

Microsoft acquires health-care software company

Microsoft has acquired the assets of Global Care Solutions Ltd., a health-care software company in Bangkok, Thailand

Global Care Solutions comprises a fully integrated hospital information system and Radiology RIS/PACS complete with image archiving, patient and bed management, laboratory, pharmacy, radiology, pathology, financial accounting, materials management and HR systems

Microsoft Research, HIV, SPAM – MS anti-spam techniques help research HIV vaccines

Ever heard of the Teiresias algorithm, for spam detection developed by Chung-Kwei at IBM – the algorithm was developed in the bioinformatics group of IBM to detect patterns in DNA

This algorithm is tested for SPAM detection- discussed in my  my earlier bioinformatics post

So you may be wodering whats thats got to do with this post, OK I am coming to it- 

Microsoft is helping  David Heckerman a Physician with a PhD in computers with spam-blocking team at Microsoft Research, to find drugs for HIV, by learning from how Anti SPAM softwares works

An e-mail featuring “Viagra,” for example, was a good bet to be spam–but things got complicated in a hurry.

if spammers saw that “Viagra” messages were getting zapped, they switched to V1agra, or Vi agra. It was almost as if spam, like a living thing, were mutating

This parallel between spam and biology got the attention of David Heckerman

Bill Gates, the company chairman “got really excited,” Heckerman says. Well versed on HIV from his philanthropy work, Gates lined up Heckerman with AIDS researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Washington, and elsewhere.

Since then, the 50-year-old Heckerman and two colleagues have created their own biology niche at Microsoft, where they build HIV-detecting software. These are research tools to spot infected cells and correlate the viral mutations with the individual’s genetic profile. Heckerman’s team runs mountains of data through enormous clusters of 320 computers, operating in parallel. Thanks to smarter algorithms and more powerful machines, they’re sifting through the data 480 times faster than a year ago. In June, the team released its first batch of tools for free on the Internet.

watch the video to learn more about the work

Microsoft Research, Indian Institute of Science Collaborate

Microsoft Research announced a sponsored research and collaboration agreement with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, India, to accelerate the scientific discovery process by increasing computational power in scientific and engineering research. This is the first agreement Microsoft Research has signed in India as part of a global effort to collaborate with leading institutions around advanced computing for science and engineering. Under this agreement, Microsoft Research has committed to providing funding and research expertise to assist with major projects around life sciences research and advanced high-performance computing platforms based on Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 for scientific applications, such as modeling of the Indian Ocean in the coming two to three years.

Professor Nagasuma Chandra, on the faculty of the Bioinformatics Centre at IISc, will be the principal investigator collaborating with Microsoft Research India for the biological data mapping project. The goal of the project is to create research tools for integration of various biological data, leading to greater understanding of biological systems as well as facilitating ready applications in many stages of drug and vaccine discovery.

Prof. R. Govindarajan of Supercomputer Education and Research Centre at IISc will lead the second project on high-performance applications using commodity clusters.

Microsoft launches Personal Healthcare Intiative -conversation with Peter Neupert VP of Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group about HealthVault

After Google announced the personal genomics and healthcare library intitaitves it is now the turn of Microsoft offering free personal health records on the Web

Microsoft announced HealthVault, an online platform where personal electronic health records can be stored.

The company’s consumer health offering includes a personal health record, as well as Internet search tailored for health queries, under the name Microsoft HealthVault www.healthvault.com

The organizations that have signed up for HealthVault projects with Microsoft include the American Heart Association, Johnson & Johnson LifeScan, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, the Mayo Clinic and MedStar Health,

Take a look at the  conversation with Peter Neupert VP of Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group about HealthVault  from the Channel9 MSDN

Scholarly publishers throws out Microsoft

After PLOS nature its the turn of microsoft, Life science researchers are in no mood to relent to industry’s interests.

Microsoft’s latest Word release has caused chaos in scholarly publishing circles. Submit a paper to, the journal Nature in Word 2007, and you will face the following warning:

‘We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature’s own editing and typesetting programs.’

And it’s not just Nature. Try Science, The Lancet and pretty much any ‘mathematics-intensive’ journal in the world and you will hit the same problem

Science and Nature will no longer accept manuscripts written in Microsoft’s Office 2007 suite. because the latest version of Word is no longer compatible with Mathematical Markup Language (MathML), the de facto standard for writing equations in text documents, according to recent notices posted on the Web sites of both Science and Nature journals. In Office 2007, Microsoft’s own Office MathML (OMML) is used for equations.

And it doesnt end there Microsoft and Sun and open world society are up in arms against each other on adoption of Open Source Document Format. Microsoft supports OOXML and Sun supports ODF (Open Document Format alliance)  which also is enjoying widespread support from academia and corporates like Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Google

India’s  21-member technical committee decided that India will vote a ‘no’ against Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML) standard at the International Standards Organisation (ISO) in Geneva on September 2.

Microsoft accelerates free access to journals

Information technology company Microsoft will give technical assistance to enhance access to online research for scientists, thats when most of the publishers of scientific journals are fighting against Open Access journals. Take a look at the blog  on the subject by  Greg at nodalpoint

Announced at a meeting in Washington in July Representatives from the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Environmental Programme, and leading science and technology publishers, together with representatives from Cornell and Yale Universities met to officially extend their free access to peer-reviewed journals for many developing world scientists to 2015, in line with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

Microsoft will provide new software called the Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 (formally Whale) that will meet increased demand for access to heavily trafficked portals and perform at the standards of today’s most heavily trafficked websites. The system will also enhance security through authentication of users when they log on.

The website that benefit includes open access websites such as   HINARI  Cochrane Library   AGORA and Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE),  

Microsoft life science

Well every one is writing about google and its foray into biology and life science, so what is going on with Other companies .

Microsoft started its BioIT alliance During 2006 and guss what Bill Gates said during the launch “Advances in our understanding of the human genome promise to revolutionize medicine and open the door to therapies that are tailored to individuals”,  means they have bigger plans. just like google entered 23andME

Founding members of the alliance include Accelrys Software, Affymetrix, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Applied Biosystems and The Scripps Research Institute, among more than a dozen other life sciences and IT companies.

and the last month Microsoft has released Microsoft Computational Biology Web Tools as open-source some code for analysis of antiviral immunity

Hmm interestingly I found the project details hosted in Codeplex the open source project hosting the details are on at MSCompBio

And then there is Stochastic Pi-Machine the programming language to model and simulate biological systems- a research funded as part of the European Science Initiative

And then there is the webpage at Microsoft research for bioinformatics

But my favourite is this

Towards 2020 Science microsoft

to define and produce a new vision and roadmap of the evolution, challenges and potential of computer science and computing in scientific research in the next fifteen years.

and this beautiful image from the microsft website