The healthcare information technology market is swelling, thanks to the federal government’s legislative and financial incentives for technological progress. While most industries have adopted technology much earlier, the healthcare industry is just beginning to catch up.
Hospitals have become a complex web of eco-systems comprising of a myriad of disparate clinical information systems. In this environment, how can clinicians adequately identify and act upon clinical risks and better care for their patients?
That’s the question leading Adelaide-based health informatics company Alcidion Group Limited (ASX:ALC) posed to health professionals, hospitals and clinicians – and this has driven the company since its inception.
Listing on the ASX in February 2016 with $7 million in cash and minimal debt, the company is seeking to improve healthcare by providing clinicians with tools to ensure highest quality of care for their patients through intelligent informatics.
Rather than clinicians spending hours learning how to use complex software or repetitive administrative tasks, Alcidion has developed software that allows health professionals to spend more time with their patients.
This software, called the Miya platform, integrates various clinical information systems to identify emerging clinical risk and provides clinical intelligence via a range of easy-to-use mobile and desktop devices.
Now the leader in what has been coined ‘intelligent informatics’, Alcidion is empowering clinicians to provide the best quality care for their patients through decision support technology.
“Health care is primarily about risk management: Detection, monitoring and mitigation. An informatics platform should play a more active role in assisting clinicians,” according to Alcidion’s Chief Executive and former Chair of the SA Health Commission, Mr Ray Blight.
Mr Blight, who co-founded Alcidion with Professor Pradhan, said Miya has been designed as a health informatics platform that is able to extract information about a particular patient and highlight their clinical risk factors in order to provide real-time clinical decision support.
“The Miya Platform is about helping the clinician understand a patient’s clinical risk so they can make the best possible decisions,” Mr Blight said.
“We are able to gather expert knowledge about a particular condition and present that in the context of a specific patient, thereby assisting the clinician in making the best possible care decisions.”
Alcidion Executive Director Nathan Buzza said the Miya platform originated from the fact that by and large information systems within clinical healthcare don’t adequately talk to each other.
“What we have developed is a supervisory system that sits on top of a hospital’s current deployments,” Mr Buzza said.
“Your current IT systems brings it all together into one platform and identifies emerging clinical risk for the patient and then pushes out those notifications to the clinicians and makes recommendations as to the best course of actions the physician should consider doing.
‘In essence, this system allows doctors, nurses and allied health professionals to spend more time with their patients and less time on data entry.”
Alcidion provides solutions across four different categories including:
Emergency Department – Miya ED software – Boosts existing EDIS with a set of clinical dashboards and ED whiteboards, allowing an Emergency Room team to highlight key risks, activate best practice guidance for common problems and detect and manage high risk lab results that arrive after the patient has been discharged.
Inpatient Services – Miya Patient Flow – Helps to keep everyone on the same page about demands on your hospital by providing a platform that integrates a Mobile EMR, Bed Management Systems and a Clinical
Information System that supports the workflows of doctors, nurses, allied health and bed managers. Adopting this service allows everyone to clearly communicate and seamlessly share information about the status of each patient.
Miya Clinicals – Integrating the Miya Clinical suite of applications and services into existing health IT infrastructure will help save clinician time and reduce errors and unmanaged risks. It allows clinicians to respond faster to emerging risks by pushing information to them on dashboard views.
Outpatient clinics – Miya Clinic- Use our Outpatient Software to save clinical time and effort spent searching for relevant data during clinics, and optimize your outpatient processes from referral through to discharge ensuring that patients receive best practice, high quality care, while reducing clinical risk. Connect our clinical OPD software with our referral management systems to provide holistic support for your administrative and clinical processes.
Alcidion’s Miya platform is installed into 15 large tertiary hospitals including Footscray, Sunshine, Williamstown, Royal Darwin and Alice Springs Hospitals and throughout Tasmania.
The company has a capable and experienced management team with a strong track record of commercialising healthcare software, including the former CEO and Chairman of the South Australian Health Commission, a Stanford qualified Medical Doctor and a former Ernst &
Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
Recent Achievements
In July 2016, Alcidion began its commercialisation strategy, having deployed numerous paid beta deployments across Australia.
As a result of the commercialisation strategy, Alcidion key highlights have included:
- Execution of a five year, $2.35m contract with Western Health for signifying the transition of our Patent Flow and Bed Management Solutions from pilot installation to commercial deployment.
- Signed an agreement with Calvary Health to assist the organisation with streamlining clinical coding and patient data across their facilities.
- Secured a $525,000 contract with Northern Territory Health Department.
- Invested $1.5m developing a Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) platform, in the form of a Best Practice Pathology Ordering product that automates the electronic ordering of pathology for ED physicians.
- Preferred vendor status for a substantial Hospital Operations Centre in New Zealand and entered into advanced stage negotiations with the District Health Board.
- Secured first customer in NSW with integration into the Cerner EMR platform.
- Entered into commercial negotiations with a private hospital group.
- Tasmania’s Department of Health went live with Miya Clinic.
