Dedalus has emerged as the strongest overall performer in Black Book Market Research’s State of Australian Healthcare IT 2026 assessment, recording the highest number of top rankings across the 18 strategic fit dimensions used to evaluate Australian EMR (Electronic Medical record) platforms.
Black Book found Dedalus consistently rated highly by Australian health service stakeholders, particularly for medication safety, integration with existing PAS (Patient Administration System) and pharmacy systems, use of open standards, and total cost and partnership value.
“Dedalus ORBIS was brought into Australia from its leading European base as a cloud-enabled modular system. In Australia, it sits alongside long-established Dedalus assets such as webPAS and MedChart, which already underpin many public and private hospitals’ patient administration systems and electronic medication management systems (eMeds), giving ORBIS a ready-made installed base to expand into,” the report says.
“From a strategic-fit perspective, ORBIS is particularly attractive for organisations already invested in Dedalus PAS and eMeds, offering a lower-disruption path to a modern EMR and data platform that builds on existing ANZ-localised infrastructure.”
The report says across the segment-level results, Dedalus (ORBIS/webPAS/MedChart) ranks highly for Clinical & Operational Effectiveness and Partnership, Value & Strategic Alignment in regional, rural and smaller public hospitals, as well as in private acute and day hospitals.
“In these settings, many providers already rely on webPAS and MedChart as critical operational and medication management backbones. For such organisations, ORBIS offers a progressive extension of existing Dedalus infrastructure rather than a wholesale platform change.”
Commenting on the survey results, Dedalus ANZ EMR/EHR Business Lead George Patapis said there was enormous value in customers who have implemented webPAS or MedChart being able to continue the journey with ORBIS. “We can build upon what’s there and provide new clinical functionality. Our solutions can be very tailored, and very specific, and it’s a less risky proposition.”
“The ability to take customers on that journey is appealing, especially for the not-for-profits and the private sector. They’re very cost conscious and more pragmatic in terms of how much they want to invest in digital. They need to see benefits and a return on their inv,” he said.
“What hasn’t been available locally before is, ‘can I just pick and choose?’ and pay for what I need, and allow me to get on that journey.
“Now, you can take the EMR clinical components you need to help improve health outcomes, the clinician experience and the patient experience,” Mr Patapis said.
“Most private hospitals would have a PAS, and the vast majority would have one from us as a starting point. What we’re seeing is organisations saying ‘you mean we can just build on what we already have and work with that?’ That’s a powerful message.”
Information infrastructure
Dedalus ANZ Chief Medical Officer Dr Vinod Seetharaman said webPAS and MedChart were long established in the Australian and New Zealand markets and core to how clients operate.
“These platforms have become critical information infrastructure, without which it’s difficult for hospital operations to run. And I think what you also note in the Black Book report is how products are localised in the regions, because policy, mandates, regulation, they differ from region to region.
“Our long history of creating products for the ANZ market means we understand local needs deeply, and customers rely on us because they want solutions that genuinely fit how they work”
“Our applications are built on open standards, allowing them to work seamlessly with customers’ existing application environments and easily align with their broader digital roadmap”
“So clients may choose to start with a PAS, and then want to modernise their medication management and then eventually when they’ve got their foundational infrastructure in place, they might want to extend IT transformation into clinical operational use cases, which is when they would go into EMRs. So, it becomes a natural progression,” Dr Seetharaman said.
Technology-forward benchmark
The Black Book report assessed 13 acute-care EMR and EHR platforms in Australia, with input from 454 validated clinicians, digital health leaders and executives across public, private and regional hospital settings.
It says there are no “single winner conclusions”, rather the report is a “technology-forward benchmark” intended to support Australian hospital and health service leadership teams as they assess digital clinical platform options across a 2026-2030 planning horizon.
Black Book founder Douglas Brown said, “Australia’s next EMR cycle is not a software refresh, it is unequivocally a whole-of-system platform decision, and the determining factors are interoperability, resilience, and data governance at scale,”
“Health service boards are now demanding proof that a platform can move real-time clinical and operational signals across LHD/HHS boundaries, sustain safe-mode continuity through cyber events or outages, and deliver an AI-ready data layer without locking organisations into bespoke technical debt.
“My Health Record connectivity is baseline infrastructure; differentiation for a platform comes from the architecture and operating model that makes it secure, usable, and clinically frictionless in day-to-day care,” Mr Brown said.
