work becomes real

As the swine flu begins to impact the U.S. population, hospitals are searching for the best ways to track influenza outbreaks in their area. Suddenly, the product that I work on, Microsoft Amalga UIS, comes to the forefront. Amalga UIS is used by healthcare facilities to collect data from all of their systems to form a complete snapshot of activities. The system is highly configurable; one of our customers, El Camino Hospital in Northern California, has configured their Alamga system to track flu cases. Within a matter of hours, clinicians at El Camino modified a few fields within Amalga to capture information specific to possible flu cases coming through the hospital’s busy emergency room.  The result is a real-time dashboard that is keeping hospital officials appraised of possible swine flu cases at El Camino and will help them respond appropriately should one or more cases be confirmed.