By ADAM GIFFORD
Auckland software house i-Health has won a $350,000 grant from Technology New Zealand to help it take part in a joint research project that could set standards for electronic health record systems across Britain.
Chief executive Brian Allen said i-Health had formed a development partnership with Wirral Hospital
in the Merseyside area to develop a web-based electronic medical record system.
Wirral has bought Clinician View, i-Health's electronic patient records system for hospitals.
The joint project is to complete development of Community View, which will give medical practitioners and agencies outside the hospital access to as much of the record as they need to treat the person.
Mr Allen said the development project would cost about $1.8 million.
"We planned to start work on Community View towards the end of this year. But Wirral said they wanted the finished product by October, so we had to bring everything forward."
The Technology New Zealand grant would help with research and development of the system's privacy and security aspects.
"With Clinician View, you have a wall around what you are doing. When you are dealing with the whole community, you may have 4000 healthcare providers from acute care specialists to physiotherapists getting access to the system.
"You need a series of locks and keys to make sure people see only what they need to," Mr Allen said.
"At the same time, and this is what these systems find hard to cope with, when you have an emergency you need some lever you can pull to get the lot."
Clinician View had already been sold to six sites and the Wirral connection should accelerate sales.
Wirral's head of informatics, Paul Charnley, said Wirral was one of 13 sites financed by the British Health Department to develop and pilot electronic record systems. "The official Department of Health requirement is that by 2005, every National Health Service will implement an electronic health record solution such as we are developing," he said.
Mr Charnley said: "What attracted us to i-Health is that it is a zero footprint, pure browser-based solution with excellent integration tools and robust security and integration protocols."
i-Health
