iSoft wins award for European labs strategy

ISoft Germany has been named a strategic leader in the European Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) market by analysts Frost & Sullivan.

Announcing the the award Frost & Sullivan said iSoft has “maintained a competitive advantage over all LIS vendors in the European market”. The analyst firm said in 2007 iSoft was the market leader for LIS revenues in Germany (31%), the United Kingdom (59%) and Spain (45%).

ISoft was commended by Frost & Sullivan for its investment its LIS software, including in remote LIS modules that manage multiple labs across hospitals within a region. The remote access module, based on Service Integrated Architecture (SIA), has been under development for the past five years.

Frost & Sullivan say the market trend is towards the establishment of a remote LIS hub that manage the laboratory operations within a certain region. In Germany, the lab operations of about 20 different hospitals in one region are now being managed by iSoft’s centralised lab services LIS hub.

"We are very pleased to receive this prestigious Frost & Sullivan Award. The recognition of such a respectable organisation makes us proud and is for iSoft an important confirmation of its position as opinion and technology leader in the European laboratory market,"said Andrea Fiumicelli, chief operating officer, iSoft Health.

Frost & Sullivan analyst Shriram Shanmugham said, "In order to ensure the proper functionality of this LIS-SIA, iSOFT has partnered with Microsoft to enable the LIS-SIA module based on .NET technology. The LIS remote hubs will support reference data across all the connected hospitals with locally interfaced devices."

He added that the firm is also investigating other LIS technology trends that offer tremendous growth potential, such as genetic testing in hospitals, transplant laboratories, and specialised immunology labs.

Shanmugham said another factor that helped iSoft win the award was its firm gaurantee on implementation time to customers. "The LIS execution time guaranteed by iSOFT ranges between a few weeks to a maximum of 6 months."

iSoft says it is now working on prototypes for interactive digital television to monitor patients and the system is interfaced with the hospital based Electronic Patient Record (EPR).