iSoft to introduce Lorenzo in two years

[dhilipkumar]

iSoft to introduce Lorenzo in two years


CHENNAI: iSoft is expecting to roll out its flagship healthcare product Lorenzo for the Indian market in two years. It considers the subscription model appropriate for the sub-continent.

"We have a broad range of products, which cover most areas of heathcare IT. We are doing a little new R&D on our products which will be the future, we believe, largely built here in Chennai are opening up an extension into Bangalore for Lorenzo," iSoft CTO Brian Cohen told ET.

Claiming the response to Lorenzo has been excellent, he said "it's still early days here because it's still been rolled out in its first sights in the UK in two hospitals, two trusts — primary care trust and an acute hospital trust. They are now using Lorenzo, live, in a limited way before they start to extend it."

In Holland and Germany, the scale of implementation has been wider and the system has been extended to the general practise community as well. For example, in Germany, it has been running in about 14 wards in a teaching hospital.

There are still a lot of areas that we need to put functionality into Lorenzo to meet the various regional requirements. "So, we haven't really rolled it out into India yet. That would be coming down the track, once we have all the extra requirements," Mr Cohen said.

Estimating to roll it out in India within two years, he said "we have to make sure that we get the infrastructure requirements right, the model right. The deployment model in India would be more appropriate here to offer it as a subscription service from a large data centre or several data centres so that there is very low initial cost to start using it."

As it is an incremental cost based on the number of the patients that are seen by the hospital, it doesn't need huge investment on maintenance and support. "Lorenzo definitely supports that because the model in the UK is to manage the whole of the North West and north east which is about 60% of the UK from datacentre," Mr Cohen said.

On Monday, the IBA Health Group company signed $11.3 million contracts with two major hospital groups in the Netherlands.

iSoft employs 2200 people at two centres of excellence in Bangalore and Chennai. "We have been growing here as well even though the economic climate is going the other way and we are still hiring and in three months we are looking for more staff," he said adding it has plans to hire 600 people in a year's time.