iSOFT’s interest in aged care

Australia’s largest listed health IT company, iSOFT, has launched an integrated management solution for aged and community care.

The Enterprise Wide Health (EWH) solution has been designed to deliver a comprehensive management system to long-term residential care, retirement living and community care providers.

The new aged care solution covers financial domains, care records, eBusiness and reporting requirements.

iSOFT’s CEO and Executive Chairman, Gary Cohen said the company has recognised the importance of aged care within the broader health context.

“As a company we are very well known for providing solutions for acute care but more and more, we have been investing in treatment and care outside of the acute environment,” he said.

“As an organisation, we have been focusing on investing in and working in aged care. We saw that as a natural extension of what we were developing for acute care because we see aged care as a very important part of the healthcare ecosystem.

“We are working to enable care to be available at the relevant place where the person needs it most. We are using our existing systems to help providers to get the care to the right place at the right time.”

The EWH solution features modules for making assessments and claiming under the Aged Care Funding Instrument (ACFI).

Based on Microsoft’s .NET framework and SQL server, the product has security and authentication policies which allow information to be shared throughout provider organisations.

The solution has also been designed to enable a better transmission of client data from aged care organisations to other healthcare providers and government bodies.

The director of iSOFT’s aged and community care product portfolio, Marc Goldman said the EWH solution is customisable to the specific needs of particular organisations.

“Within the different aged care organisations, there are different workflows and different ways of servicing communities and facilities,” he said.

“This is one of the first applications that has adopted a type of modeling that follows the workflow within the organisation – up until now providers have had to support the workflow provided by the software.

“And this one system is adaptable to all sorts of different funding types and programs.”

Although the program is aimed at organisations of all sizes, Mr Cohen said iSOFT was targeting larger organisations during the initial roll out phase.