Microsoft moves into medical software

IN A break from its normal strategy of concentrating on the core OS and leaving niches to everyone else, the Beast of Redmond has just announced that it is going into the health care business.

It has decided to buy clinical health care software developed by doctors and researchers at a non-profit hospital in Washington, D.C. They're obviously making a profit now.

Anyway, Microsoft has nabbed two of three doctors who wrote it and has allocated 40 people to the development team at the Washington Hospital Centre. So the next version should be out by 2008, then.

The software is called Azyxxi (pronounced ah-zik-see). It's designed to quickly retrieve patient information from a variety of sources including X-rays.

The software's principal designer, Dr Craig Feied, describes Azyxxi as a “data exploration engine” which works with existing clinical systems rather than replacing them. So it's a kind of Google for medics.

The man behind the Beast's move into things medical is Peter Neupert who originally quit Microsoft to become the Drugstore.com's CEO.

More at the New York Times. µ