Global healthcare IT solutions vendor Dedalus has officially launched ORBIS in the Australian and New Zealand markets, adding the electronic medical record to its growing product portfolio in the region.
The launch of ORBIS follows the introduction of the Swiftqueue outpatient scheduling solution and the amPHI electronic pre-hospital care record (ePCR) solution last year, and the extension of the DC4H interoperability platform earlier this year.
Dedalus is also introducing a version of its ClinicalAide mobility solution, which will be known locally as Pragmatic Clinicals and is powered by the company’s webPAS patient administration system.
But the EMR is the icing on the cake for Dedalus, which has not had an EMR solution for the local market before. Dedalus APAC chief medical information officer Steve Parrish told the official launch that while the company – which grew out of iSoft, CSC and DXC – was best known for its PAS, medications management and pharmacy solutions, an EMR was new territory.
“We have a deep pedigree in healthcare and being focused on healthcare,” Mr Parrish said. “You will know our Australian and NZ pedigree, and over the years, we have been known as a PAS company, and a medication company. But now being part of the Dedalus, we can bring a lot more to market.”
Italian-headquartered Dedalus has been in business in Europe since the 1980s and has implemented ORBIS in over 1000 hospitals in Europe, with a 43 per cent share of the German market and 30 per cent in France.
“We have over 1000 customers globally with ORBIS,” Mr Parrish said. “It shows the breadth of ORBIS, and it’s not that we’re bringing something new to market. We’re doing something with great depth, with 25 years of experience, and we’re bringing that into this market. Outside of America, we’re the number one provider of EMRs in the world.”
Dedalus also intends on bringing new products and services to the region, he said. It is weighing up options for virtual care and population health, and while there are no concrete plans as yet, Dedalus has a very strong laboratory, pathology and digital imaging diagnostics platform used widely in Europe.
It is also adding the ClinicalAide mobility app to webPAS to provide VMOs with a mobile clinical module providing access to real-time clinical information at the point of care.
But ORBIS is where the most interest is being generated. Dedalus Group chief product and clinical officer Michael Dahlweid said Dedalus had heavily invested over the last few years in what is the third generation of ORBIS, built on what Dr Dahlweid described as a “super modern architecture”.
“If you look at the history of ORBIS, it started in 1996 as a classic EMR. But now we’re talking about a third generation, which we started investing into a few years ago, which is all about FHIR, all about microservices, all about a super modern architecture, all about a cloud base and a strictly clinically oriented user paradigm,” he said.
The platform is hosted in the Amazon public cloud and leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing services and AWS Managed Services (AMS), which provides a set of common shared platform services such as remote access, deployment automation, network security and monitoring.
Dedalus’ largest client for the platform is the single instance used by Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP), the public health organisation covering Paris Ile de France, which includes 39 hospitals comprising of 21,000 inpatient beds, 2000 ICU beds, and 120,000 clinicians.
“15 million patients are in the region and 12 million patient records every single year, are all one single version of ORBIS, which shows how scalable that product could be,” Dr Dahlweid said.
“In Germany, you have it from a 12-bed hospital to the large scale academics, you have it from a mom and pop clinic up to a privately owned hospital group consisting of 76 hospitals all running ORBIS. So it is a proven EMR.”
Dr Dahlweid said the system was designed first and foremost with mobility in mind, and that it be so intuitive that little to no training will be required. Contemporary gesture-based navigation is available, allowing mobile users to flick through patient lists or records, or to use a mouse and keyboard. All fields are speech enabled, so clinicians can dictate into the system or use speech to text in the fields.
“What we are trying to achieve is that whenever a clinician – it could be a nurse, could be a doctor – starts to utilise ORBIS, my mantra is that there is not a single minute of educational training required,” he said. “From a physician’s standpoint, ORBIS is what the physician needs. We’ve got it organised so that the user is at the very centre of what we’re doing.”
The user experience has been designed so that clinicians can start using it straightaway, and it can be tailored to their specific requirements. “Again, my mantra is that it doesn’t need anything to get you acquainted,” he said.
“You just start using ORBIS as you go. Whatever kind of device you want to utilise, could be a laptop, it could be your iPad, it could be your mobile phone or iPhone, whatever you have, ORBIS sits there, acquainted with what you want it to do and context specific.
“We’ve made sure that the UX is slick, easy to use, easy to understand, and in less than a couple of minutes to understand what you have to do.”
The platform has been designed around the idea of widget-like dashboards that are context aware and tailored to the particular user and their role, and that capabilities are delivered in the specific realm. If a clinician is using the system but needs to attend to a patient or swap to a different device, it will still allow them to return to ORBIS with the same context.
The ability to design the dashboard is endless, he said. “The tools to design those specific dashboards for you as clinical users are given to you in a way that allows you to design your own environment without even understanding any kind of coding or computer language. We’ve taken that out. It is all being done in a low code or even no code environment.”
