Microsoft Shuts Down Amalga HIS – Lesson for EMR Selection

It’s been a couple weeks since the news came out that Microsoft was shutting down its operations and sales for Amalga HIS. It always felt awkward for me to see Microsoft purchasing a software that was so specific. It just didn’t make sense to me for Microsoft to go after this type of specific product.

John over at Chilmark Research has a good post with his reasons why Amalga didn’t work well for Microsoft. I’m still pondering his comment that the EMR market is mature. However, his take away is a very good one:

Performing a viability assessment on a potential vendor may not reduce one’s risk. Even a big, viable company such as Microsoft may change its mind on occassion and chose to exit a market.

The only clarification I’d make is that a viability assessment does not equal evaluating if the company is big and viable. I cover this topic in my EMR selection e-Book and in these two posts. Not to mention this post on open source (free) EMR software viability.

I think the viability assessment is useful and essential. Just don’t make the simple assumption that large means viable. Ask Misys users about that one.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • I did not know MS had an EHR offering; and its not a surprise that its being sunset. With MS offering Health Vault and requiring the partnership of EHR vendors, it will be in a compromising situation with respect to Channel Strategy. MS was always good at maintaining good Channel Partnerships.

    Informative post; and yes, while evaluating the EHR vendors, stability and viability of the organization is important and at the same time bigger is not necessarily safer alternative.

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