Philips Healthcare and Orion Health inked a deal to run Orion's back-end interoperability software across Philips' health informatics portfolio, the two companies announced Thursday.

The partnership means Orion's platform, called the Rhapsody Integration Engine, will be the sole integration software used in upcoming releases of Philips' health informatics products. Previously, the Andover, Mass.-based company had been using up to 17 different integration products, including Orion's, according to Dale Wiggins, Philips' chief technology officer for patient care and clinical informatics.

"What we're doing through this collaboration with Orion is providing one consistent way for hospitals and for us to integrate these deep clinical solutions," he told DOTmed News.

The Rhapsody features a simple "drag-and-drop" interface and helps make possible information sharing among different systems, such as pulling up demographic information about patients and sending it to a patient monitoring system, or forwarding billing data to the laboratory software system.

"It's designed to easily connect disparate data systems together. So, if you're getting information from one system and you need to put it in another, it's really efficient at taking that data and mapping it into the required format," Paul Viskovich, president of Orion's North America branch, headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif., told DOTmed.

The two companies have a long history together, with Philips having been a customer of Orion's for the last 10 years, Viskovich said. Talks of the current partnership began around two years ago, he said. The agreement was finalized in the beginning of March.

Philips plans a gradual roll-out of Orion-running software. The first product to make the switch over was the latest version of its Visicu solution, which Philips implemented at Ohio Health last week, Wiggins said.

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