Queensland Health has made the unusual move of issuing a restricted tender for the replacement of its 30-year-old HBCIS patient administration system (PAS), inviting just five multinationals to bid for the massive project, which is expected to cost more than $200 million and is hoped to be in place by 2023.

Pulse+IT understands that the five invited firms were Cerner, which also has the contract for the state's electronic medical record, DXC Technology, which maintains the existing system and also markets the widely used iPM and webPAS products, along with EMR vendors InterSystems, Allscripts and MEDITECH.