ENTREPRENEUR: Morris Kaplan | August 29, 2009
TASMANIA is well endowed with natural beauty and resources; it is also a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship with companies such as Tassal and Tasmanian Alkaloids on the global stage.
Local entrepreneur John Elkerton who is co-founder and chief executive of burgeoning e-health provider Healthcare Software, says there are advantages in being a business in Tasmania.
"I live in the bush with wallabies and echidnas in the back garden yet I can walk to my Hobart office in 30 minutes," he says. "It's a nice way to live and do business. I think as a smaller player we can be more strategic."
He says e-health, a nascent industry that enables the transition away from paper to electronic records, offers vast potential for his fledgling business.
"Most people assume that whenever they seek medical assistance then people who are to treat them have access to their previous medical record," Elkerton says.
"The reality is that the clinician can only ever see the records that accumulate at that point. A GP only has their record; a hospital only has your record for your stay at that hospital. Such poor communication results in less than ideal treatment choices. In an emergency situation, say you had an allergy to morphine and you're on holiday and have an accident and they give you morphine. That's a potentially life-threatening situation. It's a stark reminder of the lack of a unified record, amazing in this day and age."
Established in 2005, Healthcare Software has developed a clinical suite of software for hospitals to manage medications, patient referrals, discharge summaries, electronic prescribing, as well as lab and radiology results.
The software takes away the "old school" method of pen and paper, and streamlines communication between the hospital, community care providers and healthcare professionals.
The company, whose applications have already been implemented in 17 major hospitals throughout Tasmania and South Australia, is looking to increase that to 35 by this time next year.
Elkerton and his 12 staff are focusing their efforts on entering other states, as well as branching out internationally into New Zealand and Singapore. "Healthcare in Australia still revolves around pen, paper and human memory," he says. "Medication errors cause more deaths every year in Australia than the road toll.
"Our product significantly increases patient safety by reducing medication errors and adverse drug reactions."
Privacy hurdles and the fact technology hasn't fully arrived in health are certainly a cause for disquiet, but the mix is a veritable petri dish for an entrepreneur: a problem looking for a solution.
Elkerton's "problem" emerged during his 13 years in clinical (hospital) pharmacy in Australia and Britain.
"My work was all paper-based," he says.
"There was a folder with a patient record in it. Patient leaves hospital; commonly, the pharmacist's clinical record is destroyed or lost. I thought surely there must be some value in having an application that brought together all the information that a clinician or pharmacist required as well as being the point to further document and access for the future.
"It was a common paradigm then that hospitals were bypassed by the 90s IT revolution. Even today, an admission into hospital will result in a substantial bound-paper record of your stay in hospital."
Elkerton says the opportunity presented itself as a simple set of numbers.
"A medium-sized hospital may have a dozen of more clinical pharmacists doing the basic bottle labelling as well as being out on the ward talking to the doctors, nurses; educating patients. It piqued my interest. If there were so many people in this role, surely there would be an appetite for a solution which would support their activity."
He says his early days in business were focused on developing software.
"I dealt with the full range of health professionals, (but) I knew my weaknesses," he says.
"I was aware of my lack of business experience but I was passionate about the work and its potential to mitigate risks. You build it wrong the first time, but you build it right the second time.
"In 2005, I partnered with an IT software developer to build a commercial software package. It was a symbiotic relationship. It was 2 1/2 years of development. Apart from a small investment from a Tasmanian incubator fund, it was very lean times for the business. We were lucky to have the (incubator) funds. That kept us going for a while, then we secured a grant from AusIndustry to be able to commercialise and present product to market in 2007-08. The reality is that to develop enterprise software is hugely expensive. It takes a long time and lot of resources to get it there. No one had actually gone down the path of committing to such a substantial undertaking.
"First, it was clinical pharmacy; now we're across all aspects of medication management. The underlying theme ... is of naivety. IT business is not for the faint-hearted; it's a big numbers game.
"IT is hard, especially when you are selling software and health IT is even harder. The sale cycles are so long. The critical success factor for a small to medium-sized IT company in Australia is about gaining contracts. We've been doing this, invariably involving tenders.
"You're up against the mega companies. When we go into bat we are against multinationals. It all adds up to a substantial challenge."
A national electronic health record is a long-term aim of the federal government and opportunities in the IT industry abound.
"This is emerging as a big industry," Elkerton says.
"You've got an ageing population; you have an unsustainable growth of health as a percentage of GDP. It's heading for a train wreck unless we can develop some 21st-century modes for managing health. We have great IT and a very well advanced health system, but we can do better. Denmark is doing well; while the UK has invested a lot of money. We try to stay on that cutting edge of being the latest and the greatest."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment