To streamline their medical services, hospitals the world over are racing to equip themselves with the best possible IT systems. In this regard, hospitals in Asia are no exception.
For many top Asian hospitals, InterSystems’s TrakCare has emerged as a popular healthcare software.
InterSystems is a US$264 million privately-held software company with offices in 21 countries and corporate headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US. Its caché is the world’s number one database in clinical healthcare applications. Within the US, it sells innovative software such as Ensemble, DeepSee and HealthShare, but in Asia it offers TrakCare which the company touts as “a revolutionary Web-based healthcare information system that empowers healthcare professionals by delivering rich patient-centric information to every point of care.”
In plain words, what it means is that TrakCare is one of the few international systems to support multiple languages, multiple currencies and Asian character sets. According to Frost & Sullivan, the software’s flexibility in adapting to local practices and its ease-of use have resulted in encouraging adoption rates by medical practitioners. Because of its sophisticated software, Frost & Sullivan awarded InterSystems the 2009 Asia Pacific Award for the Healthcare IT Company of the Year.
In its citation, Frost & Sullivan said that TrakCare is among the few global products providing unified clinical, financial and administrative modules, all sitting on a single database. It also connects seamlessly with existing systems, thereby obviating the need to replace these.
Presence in Asia
TrakCare has facilitated InterSystems in penetrating the emerging Asia Pacific healthcare IT markets. Proof of the company’s success is evident in existing clients upgrading to the latest release of TrakCare and multiple new installations across key countries in the region.
Consequently, Asia has been a key driver of InterSystems’ global revenues in 2008. This achievement is the result of the company’s strengthened presence in the region with multiple new installations in Australia, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and New Zealand.
Some of its high-profile installations in 2008 include Bangkok Dusit Medical Services (BDMS), United Family Hospitals in China, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and Manipal Hospital, both in India.
BDMS says it chose TrakCare because it includes Web-based electronic patient records (EPR) that provides a single view into patient information from across all departments. “With TrakCare, we have a unified system that has increased our efficiency and given our doctors more time to focus on patient care,” notes Sasidharan Sreedran, organisation development director for BDMS. “Quicker turnaround time on test requests and immediate information availability at the point of care are driving even better clinical decisions and outcomes.”
New Delhi-based Sir Ganga Ram Hospital—a 650-bed multi-specialty state-of-the-art hospital—also cited immense benefits from TrakCare. “Early benefits include increased outpatient throughput, savings through better inventory and medical package control and support for pharmaceutical substitution, more rapid access to laboratory results, reduced adverse allergy and drug interaction incidents, and improved continuity of medical records,” said the hospital sources.
Success in China
But the biggest demand for TrakCare is anticipated from China. “Currently, the healthcare information systems market in China is dominated by domestic solutions,” says Kerry Stratton, managing director for healthcare, InterSystems. “InterSystems is one of the very few suppliers that has been able to sell a next-generation international product into China in multiple sites.”
There are other international vendors in China, says Stratton, but they tend to be implementing legacy technology. TrakCare is now in use at more than 30 hospitals in China. “InterSystems is the only international company that has been able to do that,” he says.
“What is interesting about TrakCare in China is it’s not a different version for the country,” he says. “It is the same product that is supported worldwide. TrakCare’s flexibility means you are able to tailor it and set it up to meet the Chinese workflow and the way they want to see information without having to produce a specific version for China. That’s the difference between a hard-coded versus configurable product. The language, for example, is not specially hard-coded. It is the same international version, it just includes Chinese translations.”
One of the most remarkable applications of this software has been in China’s United Family Hospitals and Clinics (UFH) organisation. It is owned and operated by Chindex International, a leading independent American provider of Western healthcare products and services in China.
According to Daniel Fulton, vice president of information technology services, UFH, TrakCare was preferred over the previous system, iSoft’s iPM, iPrescribe, and iHealthviews, which did not have multi-lingual and multi-currency capabilities. TrakCare supports UFH’s rapid growth by providing advanced clinical and administrative functionality—including multi-language and multi-currency support—and shared electronic patient records within a single unified healthcare information platform that also provides easy interoperability with other information systems.
“What is revolutionary is that Chinese customers, such as UFH, deploying TrakCare can take advantage of the same healthcare information functionality, particularly clinical functionality, which has been proven in international markets,” says Stratton.
“UFH is setting a very high standard in terms of the quality of healthcare they are providing in China,” says Stratton. He adds that the rollout of TrakCare across the whole network of UFH in China is expected to be completed over the next 18 months.
Targeted Expansion
According to a Chindex/UFH company spokesperson, the hospital’s long-term plans include targeted expansion into largely Chinese-populated markets through the development of additional United Family Healthcare facilities in Chinese cities such as Chengdu, Tianjin, Ningbo, Wuxi and Xiamen as well as more facilities in the existing markets of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
“In Beijing, we expect to significantly expand service offerings throughout 2010 through growth of our existing hospital campus as well as opening additional affiliated clinics,” says the spokesperson.
“In Shanghai, increased services at the current hospital campus throughout 2009 are expected and the opening of additional affiliated clinics in 2010. In Guangzhou, the company expects to build a hospital facility which will open in 2012.”
