Microsoft InfoPath (Formerly 'XDocs') Supports Healthcare XML Data Standard

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Today at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's 2003 Conference and Exhibition (HIMSS), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq MSFT) will demonstrate how Microsoft(R) InfoPath(TM), the new Office family application formerly code-named "XDocs," supports Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), a national XML standard for the healthcare industry. Built from the ground up on industry-standard XML, Microsoft InfoPath streamlines the process of gathering information through rich, dynamic forms and ensures that customers can easily reuse information across their entire organization. Microsoft will also unveil the official name of its information-gathering application, Microsoft InfoPath, and highlight some of its potential applications in the healthcare industry.

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"Microsoft InfoPath support for industry-standard XML schemas will be a productivity boon for a variety of vertical industries with distinct industry-specific data needs," said Joe Eschbach, corporate vice president of the Information Worker Product Management Group at Microsoft. "With Microsoft InfoPath, valuable digital information can be gathered more quickly and accurately and can be used to drive business processes more effectively. Imagine the impact on industries such as healthcare, financial services and insurance whose lifeblood is the effective gathering, sharing and application of information."

Excitement for Microsoft InfoPath, due out in mid-2003, is already building in the healthcare industry. In addition to InfoPath being featured in demonstrations on CDA at HIMSS this week, Amicore Inc., a practice improvement company that provides software and services to physicians, today announced that it plans to include InfoPath in its upcoming Amicore Integrated Management solution, which will be available in the third quarter of this year. Aimed at helping physicians streamline the data-gathering workflow process, Amicore's solution will draw heavily on InfoPath support for XML-based Web services as well as its data-validation capabilities.

Making the Electronic Medical Record a Reality

According to Microsoft research, approximately 70 percent of healthcare transactions today are paper-based, resulting in administrative costs of up to 20 cents of each dollar spent. With Microsoft InfoPath, however, healthcare institutions will have a way to implement the CDA standard, and improve the quality of care they can offer by having patients' complete medical history available to travel with them digitally.

"The Health Level Seven Clinical Document Architecture (ANSI/HL7 CDA R1.0-2000) is a simple-to-implement XML specification that, in release 2.0, will carry the full expressive power of the HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM)," said Liora Alschuler, co-chair of the HL7 Structured Documents Technical Committee, and project manager for the HL7 HIMSS demo. "We're pleased to see industry support for this initiative, which has the potential to extend the exchange of clinical documents across the broadest spectrum of care."

With InfoPath, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and HMOs can capture vital information about patients within an InfoPath form that they create, validate the information for accuracy, and save it in a CDA-compliant file, which can be read and used by other back-end systems, such as hospital information systems, document management software, portals or even other organizations. As a result, data entered into InfoPath can be shared and accessed by anyone within the organization as well as by external stakeholders. For example, a physician filling out a patient's diagnosis form could query an external knowledge base to identify the appropriate medication covered by the patient's insurance, check for potential interactions with the other medications in the patient's file, and submit the order to the patient's local drugstore for the pharmacy to fill -- all from within InfoPath.

An Effective Prescription for the Ills Facing Healthcare Today

Because of the ability of InfoPath to work with new or existing data gathering solutions, healthcare solution providers are expressing great interest in its potential. Today Amicore, a practice improvement company that provides software and services to physicians, announced its intentions to include InfoPath in an upcoming solution it is developing, to be available in the third quarter of this year.

"Physicians today often find themselves having to re-enter data from various sources about their patients. It's a painful process, both for doctors and the patients they serve, and often results in omissions in the patient's record," said Reese Gomez, vice president of Marketing and Product Development at Amicore. "By using InfoPath as part of our Integrated Management solution, physicians will be able to further simplify the process of gathering patient information so they can focus on what really matters -- their patients -- and be confident that the information they need is all there in the record."

Drawing on the support for XML-based Web services in InfoPath, physicians using Amicore's solution will be able to query a Web service from within InfoPath to find existing data they need about their patients, reducing the need to re-enter data or, potentially more frustrating, ask their patients for it again.

Applications Beyond Healthcare

Built from the ground up on industry-standard XML, InfoPath enables users to create rich, dynamic forms that capture information that can be incorporated into business processes in industries ranging from healthcare to services to manufacturing, as well as functional areas such as human resources or sales. Featuring support for customer-defined XML schemas, InfoPath allows companies not only to capture data that previously would have been lost, but also to define and organize it to meet their unique needs.

Featuring tight integration with "Office 11" applications as well as support for SharePoint(TM) Team Services, InfoPath enables users to collect and share data easily -- with others in their workgroup, or with co-workers and partners located halfway around the world.

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Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software -- any time, any place and on any device.

NOTE: Microsoft, InfoPath and SharePoint are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

For more information about Microsoft InfoPath: Please visit http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2002/oct02/10-09officefamily.asp or the Microsoft InfoPath site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/infopath/ .

To learn more about Microsoft's support for XML in Microsoft InfoPath and "Office 11": Please visit http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2002/nov02/11-12xmloffice.asp .

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