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St. Joseph Hospital in Omaha wanted to make its computers more interactive. So the institution brought in Quilogy, a St. Charles computer consulting firm, which linked the hospital's document management files and gave each department access to policy and procedure files.
Quilogy did not stop there. Its solution also enabled St. Joseph's employees to share schedules and documents from separate programs and simultaneously hold discussions online. It also allowed the staff quick access to national databases with definitions of specific drugs and drug interactions with other medications and combine that information with the hospital's own patient records online. The same system also can generate prescriptions and submit them to pharmacies.
Yet as innovative as Quilogy's is it won a $20,000 award from Microsoft Corp. for creating the system - Chief Executive Randy Schilling said that in the next few years all companies will be handling business in a similar way.
Microsoft is pushing a new technology tool - known as NET and pronounced "dot net" - which allows users to combine various program elements over the Internet...