Dell to Collaborate with Microsoft and Stellaris Health Network to Deliver Innovative Software-as-a-Service Analytics Solution for Community Hospitals

Dell and Microsoft Corp. will collaborate to deliver an analytics, informatics, Business Intelligence (BI) and performance improvement solution designed specifically to meet the needs of community hospitals through an affordable, subscription-based model.

Delivered by Dell as a hosted online service, the solution combines Microsoft Amalga, an enterprise health intelligence platform, with Dell’s cloud infrastructure and expertise in informatics, analytics and consulting.

The new offering will be developed in collaboration with Stellaris Health Network, a community hospital system that consists of Lawrence Hospital Center, Northern Westchester Hospital, Phelps Memorial Hospital Center and White Plains Hospital. These hospitals will serve as the foundation members in the solution development process.

Community hospitals will have access to targeted, focused views of consolidated patient data from source systems across the hospital, enabling organizational leaders, clinicians and physicians to rapidly gain insights into the administrative, clinical and financial data needed to make ongoing operational decisions. This information will further enable hospitals to provide patients with advancing levels of high quality, evidence-based care. In addition, the solution will provide add-on, business-focused applications.

The initial application (The Quality Indicator System or QIS) also will play a key role in helping community hospitals manage quality indicator reporting requirements as mandated by CMS, the Joint Commission and the new meaningful-use measures now mandated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This application is unique to the market in that it will go beyond the CMS-required metrics to deliver advanced quality indicator alerts and prevent metrics from being missed. The QIS will capture data as a patient enters the hospital, determine which quality measures may apply to the patient, and then enable the hospital to track and measure compliance throughout the patient’s stay.

Dell is building upon its existing relationship with Stellaris Health Network by conducting a pilot of the solution at the network’s four hospitals in Westchester, N.Y. The pilot will begin in March and will provide Stellaris hospitals with integrated workflow design, documentation integrated within its information system, and advanced reporting of quality measures.

"As a network of community hospitals, we are excited about the ability to more easily and affordably create an interactive environment where our physicians and other clinicians can obtain quality metrics in real-time,” said Arthur Nizza, CEO, Stellaris Health Network. "Through our demonstration project with Dell and Microsoft, we look forward to leveraging the considerable investment our hospitals have made in improving clinical care and patient outcomes by sharing best practices that will further advance the care provided by community hospitals.”

As the collaborative expands to include new members, additional applications will be developed to solve other commonly identified business issues found in the community hospitals such as solutions for turn-around time delays, care coordination, managing avoidable readmissions, and population based healthcare management for chronic conditions.

"Uniting our companies’ complementary strengths in healthcare software, IT services and enterprise-class server systems, Dell and Microsoft are uniquely positioned to bring to market new modular healthcare solutions aimed squarely at the needs of small and mid-sized hospitals,” said Berk Smith, vice president, Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences Services. "We’re excited to collaborate with Microsoft and Stellaris Health to deliver a set of rich informatics, analytics and reporting applications that are not only easy and cost-effective to adopt, but also are designed to create more value out of existing IT systems.”

"In a highly dynamic healthcare landscape, hospitals of all sizes are challenged by a lack of timely access to health data stored in their enterprise technology systems, which has a direct impact on timely decision-making and ultimately the quality of care,” said Peter Neupert, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Health Solutions Group. "With Dell and Stellaris, our goal is to offer a set of solutions that make it simple for small and mid-sized hospitals, which typically don’t have extensive IT departments, to readily access and analyze the data they need to identify gaps in care quality and take the right steps to make measurable improvements.”

About Dell

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to its customers and uses that insight to make technology simpler and create innovative solutions that deliver reliable, long-term value. Learn more at www.dell.com. Dell’s Informatics and Analytics Practice spans hospitals, community based healthcare providers, physician services and payer market segments. In each of these segments, the Dell solutions encompass the entire spectrum of healthcare informatics needs including data acquisition, storage, management, analytics, and reporting. Coupled with Dell's expertise in healthcare consulting is a broad depth of knowledge and experience in technology solutions which have made Dell an award winning Technology Services organization worldwide.

About Microsoft in Health

Microsoft is committed to improving health around the world through software innovation. Over the past 13 years, Microsoft has steadily increased its investments in health with a focus on addressing the challenges of health providers, health and social services organizations, payers, consumers and life sciences companies worldwide. Microsoft closely collaborates with a broad ecosystem of partners and delivers its own powerful health solutions, such as Amalga, HealthVault, and a portfolio of identity and access management technologies acquired from Sentillion Inc. in 2010. Together, Microsoft and its industry partners are working to deliver health solutions for the way people aspire to work and live.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

About Stellaris Health Network

Based in Armonk, NY and founded in 1996, HealthStar Network, Inc. (dba Stellaris Health Network) is the corporate parent of Lawrence Hospital Center (Bronxville, NY), Northern Westchester Hospital (Mount Kisco, NY), Phelps Memorial Hospital Center (Sleepy Hollow, NY), and White Plains Hospital (White Plains, NY). In addition to the network of hospitals, Stellaris provides ambulance and municipal paramedic services to Westchester County, New York through Westchester Emergency Medical Services. With nearly $850 million in combined revenue and 1,100 in-patient beds, Stellaris Hospitals account for over a third of the acute care bed capacity in Westchester County. It is one of the largest area employers, with over 5,000 employees and approximately 1,000 voluntary physicians on staff. The Stellaris Hospitals provide multidisciplinary acute care services, as well as a range of community based services such as hospice, home health, behavioral health and physical rehabilitation. As Stellaris pursues new programs and joint ventures, it will continue to evolve as the regions’ leading healthcare system, dedicated to preserving high quality, community-based care for residents of Westchester, Putnam, Rockland, Dutchess, Northern Bronx, and Fairfield Counties.