Jab for Healthphone with Microsoft deal

Matt Hector-Taylor says Healthphone provides one of the few 'end-to-end' healthcare information systems. Picture / Dean Purcell

Auckland technology company Healthphone has bagged its first overseas customer after securing a potentially lucrative global partnership deal with Microsoft last month.

Healthphone's technology provides health workers with access to patient information and other data over PCs, laptops or other mobile devices.

Its solutions are built around Microsoft applications and last month it announced a deal with the software giant which involves harnessing Microsoft's global marketing muscle to promote Healthphone to potential customers.

"Our technology strategy is that we use core Microsoft products rather than it being a standard development where you cut code," says Healthphone chief executive Matt Hector-Taylor.

"What we've done is integrated a whole level of products [including Microsoft Office, Exchange, SharePoint and BizTalk] so every time a Healthphone licence is sold, Microsoft gets a fee for the use of those products. If you look at their business model, they're very into moving into the subscription model and moving slightly away for the licence purchase model - so it plays to their strategy as well."

Healthphone's export strategy is to work with Microsoft in each market and also to sign up a local telecommunications provider to help sell and deliver its technology to customers.

The strategy is already working in the Canadian market, where local telco Telus has helped it sign up its first international client, a Toronto-based health provider with eight sites.

Hector-Taylor said the deal with Closing The Gaps Healthcare Group, which runs nursing homes, rehabilitation services, home care services, corporate health, and mental health services, would be worth about C$750,000 (about $1 million) to Healthphone over three years and, more importantly, would be "a very important reference customer".

The deal showed how the alliance with Microsoft and a local telco could work effectively, he said.

"That's the advantage of the Healthphone model.

"We have both Microsoft Canada and Telus out there prospecting and selling on our behalf so we don't have to put a big direct sales force into Canada because we've got these two national organisations already doing it for us."

Hector-Taylor said Healthphone, which has 25 staff, would follow a similar strategy in other markets. It has set up a Sydney office and is talking with a major Australian telco.

Healthphone's technology provided one of the few "end-to-end" integrated healthcare information systems on the market designed specifically for the community care and long-term condition management sectors of the health industry, Hector-Taylor said.

While large global players provided similar systems for GPs and acute hospital care, "we're not directly in those areas, we're the rest of the health sector - effectively it's about 40 per cent of the sector," he said.

"This part of the market has traditionally been under-serviced and the reason it's under-serviced is it's quite fragmented, a large proportion of the workforce is mobile and it doesn't have large numbers of doctors in it so it hasn't got the glamour factor."


HEALTHPHONE

* Who: Matt Hector-Taylor, chief executive.

* Where: Auckland (with offices in Sydney and Toronto).

* What: Technology for accessing patient information in the community care and long-term condition management sectors of the health industry, eg nursing homes, age care, hospices, mental health, social services and rehabilitation.

* Why: "This part of the market has traditionally been under-serviced."