NEW ORLEANS -- Microsoft Monday announced its entry into the healthcare IT industry with an acquisition of a company and an initiative to build out Microsoft IT healthcare solutions.

At the Health Information and Management Systems Society conference here, Ballmer outlined Microsoft’s healthcare plans in a keynote address to 26,000 IT professionals.

“I was very, very excited to be given this opportunity [to speak],” says Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “The whole area is the largest segments of the world’s economy, it's one of the fastest growing, it’s an information play that will have an increasingly big role in the opportunity for information technology to make an incredible difference. In some senses it's an industry that has yet to be fully scratched by IT technologies the ways other industries have,” says Ballmer.

“This industry is simply to big and too important to not have a dedicated focus and feel,” says Ballmer.

Microsoft acquired Medstory, a healthcare search company and added the company to its healthcare portfolio. Last year, the company acquired Azyxxi, a company that markets a patient information system. Financial terms were not disclosed for the acquisition of Medstory, which has fewer than 10 employees.

Microsoft also announced a blueprint called the Connected Health Framework – a set of blueprints and code that will let programmers update legacy programs for automation of forms or other systems.