by Tony Chen

Recently, I had the opportunity to experience a live demo of Microsoft's Azyxxi software. A lot of buzz has been circulating around the software for a few reasons:
- It was designed by physicians
- It's already working in 20+ hospitals across the country
- Pundits wonder whether Google or Microsoft will be the one to make the mark on healthcare. Personally, I think there's enough room for both of them.

Anyway, I have to say that I was actually quite impressed with what I saw. Azyxxi basically takes continuous data feeds from all the relevant hospital systems (lab, finance, patient, scheduling, ER, any system within the hospital) and rolls it up into one elegantly simple interface. While it's still unclear to me how these feeds are set up, I could quickly see the power that such a system could represent. Think about it - live data feeds in real time.

Anyway, here's the long-awaited screenshot:

You can't really see it well in the screenshot, but basically, users can:
- tailor their view & the data fields to be seen
- double click on any data field to get more info
- perform quick trending, graphing, averages, etc on any data element
- easily perform custom analysis
- easily get to key metrics, dashboard metrics, daily census, etc

Maybe the most impressive part of the demo was the person giving us the demo, Jon Handler, one of the original ER physicians that helped Azyxxi get off the ground. If you ever have a chance to meet him, I think you'll also quickly see that his passion for patients and consequently, for the right info in the right hands at the right time is refreshing. It almost makes me optimistic about the future of healthcare. Almost.