As part of Microsoft's strategy to dig its heels deeper into the health care world, the company announced on Wednesday that it's renamed its portfolio of enterprise software for the health care industry.

The new Amalga brand is now the umbrella name for all Microsoft enterprise health care industry software, including products formerly known as Azyxxi and Hospital 2000, which were products Microsoft acquired. Microsoft's Amalga brand offering spans clinical, operational, and financial functions in health care.

In addition to its Amalga product line for hospitals and other health care providers, Microsoft last October entered the consumer health care market with HealthVault, a platform that provides free Web-based health-related search and personal health record tools.

The word Amalga comes from the Latin word "amalgama," meaning "to bring together different elements," reflecting Microsoft's strategy to "bring solutions to providers and executives, allowing them to access patient information when and where they need it," said the company in a statement.

"We're trying to solve the complexity issue in health care with our solutions," said Davide Vigano, Microsoft health solutions group's general manager of enterprise marketing, in an interview with InformationWeek. "No matter how you look at it, health care is filled with challenges," he said.

With its Amalga product, formerly known as Azyxxi, Microsoft offers health care providers a "unified intelligence system" that enables doctors and other clinicians to "get data anywhere data is stored to help them make more intelligent clinical decisions," said Vigano. In most hospital environments, there are multiple disparate systems and applications in many departments, making it very difficult for, say, an ER doctor to access a patient's radiology or drug information in other systems, said Vigano.

Amalga helps health care providers access information to make better clinical decisions, he said. Its predecessor, Azyxxi, was originally created by doctors and developers at MedStar Health's Washington Hospital. Microsoft acquired the software in July 2006 and since then has been enhancing it for use by other organizations.

Right now Microsoft's seven early adopters of the software include a variety of hospitals and health care providers. They include MedStar, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Johns Hopkins Health System, Novant Health (in North Carolina and South Carolina), H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, Fla., St. Joseph Health System (including its entire operations in California, west Texas, and eastern New Mexico); and the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange, a regional health information organization, or RHIO.

Recently, Microsoft added new technology "on the architecture side" of the Amalga software, he said. That enhancement includes a "new middle tier based on IIS 6.0 that provides higher security, reliability, and scalability," he said.

Microsoft plans to make that newly enhanced version of Amalga generally available in fiscal 2009, which begins in July, he said.

In addition to Microsoft Amalga, another key product under the new Amalga banner is the former Hospital 2000, now renamed Microsoft Amalga Hospital Information System. This integrated health information system is built around an electronic medical record system, and includes software for hospital labs, pharmacies, radiology, pathology, financial accounting, materials management, human resources, and bed management. Microsoft is primarily targeting this software in emerging global markets, such as India and Brazil, said Vigano.

Although Microsoft has been focused on the health care industry for about 12 years, most of those efforts had been on selling its horizontal offerings, such as BizTalk, to health care providers. Over the last two years, however, Microsoft has been ramping up its emphasis on health care with new vertical product offerings coming from acquisitions.

Today, Microsoft generates "hundreds of millions of dollars" from the health care market, Vigano said, and that industry offers strong opportunities moving forward.