In order to spur informatics-driven solutions to address health care challenges, Royal Philips Electronics and Microsoft Corp will combine their efforts to build on Philips Healthcare’s foundation of health care informatics and advanced clinical decision support offerings.

According to the release, the companies share a common vision for advancing health care transformation: simplified clinician workflow, better financial outcomes, and improved patient care. Working together, the companies aim to integrate technologies that will yield faster delivery of meaningful health information, further improve health care efficiency and productivity, and reduce development and infrastructure costs.

“Information is only as powerful as the ability to share it among those that play an integral role in patient care,” said Tim Smokoff, general manager of worldwide health at Microsoft. “This collaboration is a step toward integrating different sources of information, and then providing actionable knowledge in clear, useful formats that suit the needs of the different people who are working to improve care at the point of care.”

At the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society 2010 Conference & Exhibition, Philips and Microsoft showcased two works-in-progress born of their collaboration: the integration of Philips VISICU’s eICU program with Microsoft Windows server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010 Beta; and Philips IntelliVue XDS, which is being adapted to run on Windows 7.

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