Orion debut offers slice of C$1b health injection

By RICHARD PAMATATAU

Auckland's Orion Software is hoping its C$9 million ($10.6 million) system being launched this week in Edmonton's Capital Health will help it snare some of the C$1 billion being injected into patient care by the Canadian Government.

Ian McCrae, Orion managing director, said the system was a Canadian first as the country moved down the path to electronic health records management.

Orion has been flogging its systems in North American for some time and this deal is the first to go live. Once implemented it will have about 10,000 healthcare workers - doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other staff - accessing patient information across the Capital Health Network.

Capital Health is one of Canada's largest public healthcare providers and looks after 1.6 million people across central and northern Alberta, and northern and western Canada.

It provides specialised services such as trauma and burn treatment, organ transplants and high-risk obstetrics from 13 hospitals with over 2600 beds, 22 public health centres, nine mental health clinics, and a nurse call centre for health information and advice.

McCrae said the company should be able to use Capital Health as the prime example to win a lot of other business coming on stream.

The project is called netCARE and provides easy access to important information about patients by joining the separate "islands" of information that existed across Capital Health's facilities.

Other companies working on the project are Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Sierra Systems, and Quovadx.

Andrew Clements, director of venture capital funds Emerald Capital and Zeus Capital, said Zeus was very happy with Orion.

Zeus had put several million dollars into Orion.

The company was making good products and finding a place in the market, he said.

Kiwi companies needed to recognise that doing the big deal is actually not a big deal, said Clements, because that was what they exist for. "If a company is reliant on the next big deal then something is going wrong."

Clements said more Kiwi software companies had to understand that while they had a good deal, what was more important was knowing how to take the product and have people overseas to sell it.