Microsoft and Athenahealth have announced a partnership to connect Athenahealth’s cloud-based EHR and practice management software with Microsoft’s Amalga enterprise health intelligence system.

The collaborative projects are due to be completed by the second half of 2011, and are expected to eventually create a path for other healthcare providers to use Amalga to push data from an assortment of disparate clinical systems, including ambulatory and in-patient data, into patients’ HealthVault personal e-health records.