MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – El Camino Hospital, with a stated mission of being among the 5 percent of top-performing hospitals in the country, has pulled disparate data together with Microsoft's Amalga technology.

The Amalga platform aggregates all of the hospital's information from separate systems and integrates it into a single system.

The investment is part of a three-year initiative aimed at helping El Camino Hospital achieve a top 5 percent ranking among U.S. hospitals across all of its service lines.

"Achieving the highest standards in patient care is the single most important goal of El Camino Hospital," said Eric Pifer, MD, chief medical information officer at the hospital. "But we cannot reach that goal without the ability to measure our progress against specific quality standards. Amalga allows us to quickly collect, view and analyze data of any type, giving us unprecedented insight into the hospital's performance and greater opportunity to innovate for improved quality."

El Camino is using Amalga to build a scorecard for evaluating hospital units and individual clinicians in 12 areas of patient care, including cardiovascular, oncological, surgical and obstetric excellence; care of the septic and critically ill patient; care of common severe illnesses; care of the patient with specific needs; patient safety and process control; hospital-acquired infections; patient experience; hospital complications; and efficiency and throughput.

Before implementing Amalga, the hospital was unable to integrate data from multiple systems to evaluate performance. Amalga will provide one view into all data collected by the hospital, enabling El Camino to identify areas of improvement, measure progress against annual goals and drive improvements in group and individual performance.