Amalga will provide researchers at Seattle Children's Hospital with a single view of electronic data needed to identify trends and relevant patients for clinical trials, as well as enable clinical staff to better manage hospital operations, such as anticipating a patient's length of stay.

"Currently, our clinical and research staff requests information from a single data department, so it can often take days or weeks to get the information back to the person requesting it," said Drex DeFord, senior vice president and chief information officer at Children's. "Because Amalga will allow staff members from all departments to pull the information they need more quickly and in real time, it will allow us to make full use of the patient data stored throughout our organization."

"Since multiple data systems can be integrated into Amalga, we hope to streamline data management, eventually realigning resources to support consolidated data management and reporting instead of maintaining multiple, nonintegrated data sources," DeFord said.

Amalga is in use at other well-known U.S. healthcare institutions, including District of Columbia Primary Care Association, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Johns Hopkins Health System, Novant Health, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, St. Joseph Health System and the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange.

Is your healthcare organization making efforts to bring its data together? Tell us how. Send your comments to Editor Bernie Monegain at bernie.monegain@metechpublishing.com.