Magic Software Enterprises has signed a deal worth an initial $500 000 to develop a new patient administration system for McKessonHBOC, the world`s largest supplier of software solutions, technological innovation and comprehensive services to integrated health delivery networks, hospitals, home health providers, pharmacies and providers of managed care. Plans call for the new system, called the Pathways Patient Administration System, to be launched this summer in the UK for deployment by health services throughout Europe and across the globe.
McKessonHBOC is using Version 8.2 of Magic`s highly productive application development and deployment technology to quickly develop Pathways, which they expect to be the core strategic product for expanding their customer base in Europe. The base platform for the new system is MS Windows NT and SQL Server, although McKessonHBOC plans to take advantage of Magic`s platform independence and enterprise-wide scalability to quickly port Pathways to many other RDBMS and operating environments.
"Adaptability is vital to healthcare providers which tend to upgrade their infrastructure and software in stages. Products must employ an open systems architecture that enables them to add functionality without making their current systems obsolete," says Peter Loomes, McKessonHBOC`s program manager. "Magic allows us to develop Pathways in a modular fashion."
Ian Gibson, McKessonHBOC`s new product development manager, adds: "The openness of the solution has already been proven. Both a port to an alternative database and hardware platform have been completed in practically no time at all."
Magic also offers McKessonHBOC`s developers the speed and flexibility to focus more sharply on the functionality of Pathways, which will be used to rapidly process the large volumes of mission-critical data essential to the day-to-day operations of McKessonHBOC`s customers. Pathways will handle everything from management of patient referrals, patient flow and contract administration to hospital and outpatient scheduling and outcome of care coding. Pathways will also provide hospital administrators with easy access to archive data.
"It is vital for healthcare service providers to maintain accurate historical data. This is important for such things as epidemiological studies. In addition, individual hospital systems will soon need to link to a central UK National Health Patient Administration Register," say Loomes. "Magic`s strength is that it enables us to respond to all of these and other specific customer requirements, such as making the application fully keyboard operated, critical in healthcare environments where there must be a lot of rapid data input."
In addition to enabling McKessonHBOC to develop a complete patient administration system that responds to the individual needs of its global customers, Magic has provided McKessonHBOC with a flexible, commercial framework that allows the Company to conform more comfortably to the British Government`s PFI initiative. Under that initiative, suppliers are encouraged to take a small amount of revenues at the front-end of contracts, back-loading remaining revenues to more closely align with government spending allocations.
Magic products are distributed in South Africa by Exsol.
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