LOUISVILLE, KY – Norton Healthcare, a Louisville, Ky.-based healthcare system, will use Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) and Microsoft HealthVault to aggregate and mine data for its Accountable Care Organization (ACO) initiative.

The not-for-profit system, which includes five Louisville hospitals and 12 Norton Immediate Care Centers, is working with Humana, Inc. to establish the first ACO in the region, which represents one of four national pilot sites for the Brookings-Dartmouth ACO Pilot Project. The ACO model Norton and Humana are co-creating established incentives for health systems to increase quality and efficiency, better coordinate patient care, eliminate waste and reduce the overuse and misuse of care.

Microsoft Amalga UIS, a data aggregation platform, will assist Norton Healthcare in gaining longitudinal, person-centric and population views of patient data stored across multiple sites and providers, a key element of the ACO pilot. The ability to view a broad set of individual and population patient data will enable the ACO to identify ways to improve the quality of care, improve care coordination across the community and reduce costs.

As part of the ACO pilot, Norton will also use Amalga UIS to create comprehensive views of patients managing chronic conditions by combining clinical data from inpatient and outpatient sites, payment data from Humana, and patient-provided data from HealthVault, a personal health application platform. This will help Norton to identify opportunities for more supportive care, support patient self-monitoring and management, better manage care transitions, and reduce hospital readmissions.

The ACO will use HealthVault to support the creation of a patient-centric medical home by giving patients an easy way to store and share personal health information with providers, and to track and share health indicators, including blood pressure and weight, through the use of connected personal health devices, such as blood pressure cuffs, glucometers and scales that are connected to their healthcare provider via computer.

"Using Amalga UIS and Microsoft HealthVault, Norton Healthcare will have access to an extensive system wide data and patient relationship strategy designed to improve the health and quality of care for our patients," said Steven T. Hester, MD, system senior vice president and chief medical officer, Norton Healthcare. "We can use the data to provide a more complete view of a patient's history."

"We're excited to collaborate with Norton Healthcare on its ACO initiative and demonstrate the power of data to transform healthcare," added Peter Neupert, corporate vice president, Microsoft Health Solutions Group. "We look forward to showing how unlocking health data and making it available for re-use across a health system, from hospital to clinic to home, can improve care outcomes for patients and create efficiencies at the same time."