Allscripts picked for Southern Australia

Southern Australia Health has named Allscripts as the Vendor of Choice (VOC) for a major project to upgrade clinical IT systems across the huge sparsely populated state.

Southern Australia Health now plans to deploy the Sunrise Enterprise 5.5 suite of advanced clinical, access management and financial solutions to its 80 metropolitan and rural hospitals and health clinics, which serve a population of 1.6m in an area approximately 40% larger than Texas.

The Allscripts Sunrise Enterprise suite will replace more than 30 obsolete information systems and databases across SA Health.

E-Health Insider understands that US Allscripts for was picked for the e-health project ahead of Cerner, Australia’s iSoft, and Intersystems Trak.

The selection of Allscripts forms part of the government of Southern Australia’s initiative to implement an integrated Electronic Health Record (EHR) to improve patient safety and the health system’s efficiency by providing a single, secure, electronic patient record across all SA Health facilities.

Allscripts has been selected to provide the project’s central hub, called the Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS), which will give healthcare professionals timely, secure access to a patient’s vital information wherever and whenever they need it.

“We selected Allscripts to implement the foundation for South Australia’s e-health record system because of their excellent track record delivering health information solutions for organizations around the world, including the Asia Pacific region,” said SA Health’s chief medical officer, Professor Paddy Phillips.

Allscripts chief executive officer Glen Tullman, said: “We look forward to finalizing this agreement, which will be one of Allscripts largest to date, and moving to rapid deployment."

The agreement between SA Health and Allscripts is subject to contract negotiations and final approval expected during the first half of 2011. Implementation is expected to begin during the second half of 2011.

Allscripts will deploy Sunrise Enterprise 5.5 in conjunction with its Helios open architecture platform, which is said to enable any healthcare organization to quickly and easily extend and integrate Allscripts solutions to communicate with other clinical, non-clinical and legacy information systems.