Australian initiative speeds future for Auckland firm

By ADAM GIFFORD

A Victoria state Government initiative to increase productivity of state agencies has given Auckland healthcare software developer iHealth the opportunity to fast-track its next generation product.

It has signed a development and implementation contract with Melbourne Health, which includes Royal Melbourne Hospital and Melbourne Extended Care & Rehabilitation Service, to build a web-based patient referral system.

Chief executive Brian Allen said the new product built on existing iHealth applications like Clinician View and Patient View.

While those applications presented data from existing healthcare applications to support existing work practices or new models of collaborative care, the referral module was part of iHealth's move to more transactional applications.

"Melbourne Health reckons it will need more than 400 referral forms to cater for all the different health services under its umbrella, so we have developed something to handle that," Allen said.

He said different disciplines required different information to be captured and a component of the product would deal with generic workflow, while another part would enable users to generate specific information in the form they wanted.

Melbourne Health project manager Allan Napier said the project was financed by a A$570,000 ($629,000) grant from Victoria's Department of Human Services to improve productivity.

The initial deployment of Referrals Management is to allow Royal Melbourne Hospital to electronically refer patients to aged care or sub-acute rehabilitation.

"If we can improve the information flow from the wards to the consultants who do aged care, we can get more timely assessments and more patients through with fewer bed days," Napier said.

The system also replaces handwritten referral notes. While Melbourne Health was not an existing iHealth customer, it did use enterprise application integration tools from Seebeyond, a company with which iHealth works closely.

Because the development is state-funded, the Victorian Government can get preferential pricing if it wants to buy the referral module for other hospitals.

However, Brian Allen said iHealth retained the intellectual property and considered it very much a product rather than a custom development.