Healthcare systems to be sold across the Tasman

By ADAM GIFFORD

Auckland-based health software company i-Health has lined up with middleware vendor SeeBeyond and services company Cap Gemini Ernst & Young to sell electronic patient record systems across the Tasman.

i-Health, part of the Galen Group of software companies, makes a browser-based clinical information system, also called i-Health.

"One of the key objectives of the [Australian government's] HealthConnect strategy is to consolidate all patient information into a single electronic file and make that information available to clinicians at the point of care - whether that be in a doctor's surgery or in a hospital ward," said i-Health chief executive Brian Allen.

He said the i-Health software enables clinicians to extract the information they need to treat a patient from the underlying patient management or clinical systems into a patient record which is most relevant to them.

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young will be involved as implementers. So far i-Health has completed the Clinician View module, giving clinicians all the information they need to work. The next step is Community View, offering the data in a form which will be useful to general practitioners and primary care providers. A beta version is being developed with Rotorua's Lakeland Health, and the module should be complete by July.

The final version of i-Health will also include Organisation View, presenting the data in the format required by health administrators, and Patient View, which will allow patients to access their own records over the web.

Roger Hatrick-Smith, CGEY health practice director for the South Pacific region, said the HealthConnect strategy identifies a need for clinicians to be better connected to information about their patients, and with one another.

As well as Lakeland, i-Health has been bought by Otago Healthcare, and several other hospitals are evaluating it. Mr Allen said said i-Health is competing in Australia against overseas systems which sell for $15 million to $20 million.

"We sell for 10 to 20 percent of that."

In New Zealand, its main competitor is another Auckland firm, Orion Healthcare Systems, whose Concerto Web Integration Environment software is used by Auckland Healthcare and South Auckland Health, among others.

Orion has a distribution agreement with Hewlett Packard medical technology spin-off Agilent, which is helping it sell its software into Asia.

Links:


i-Health

SeeBeyond

Concerto