E-observations platform provider Patientrack will expand its work with NHS hospitals in England after announcing its acquisition by health informatics software company, Alcidion.

Patientrack said the move would  “create a powerful specialist healthcare technology company focused on next-generation patient safety, decision intelligence and analytics technology for healthcare.”

Hospitals will benefit from the same Patientrack team in the UK while gaining access to new services and products offered by Australia-based Alcidion, the company added.

Completion of the acquisition is expected on 29 June 2018, with the transaction subject to an Alcidion shareholder vote at a meeting expected to take place in early June.

Patientrack allows clinicians to record vital signs on mobile devices, rather than on paper charts. It provides doctors and nurses with early warnings when patients are at risk of deterioration, with a view of helping them better identify deadly conditions like sepsis and acute kidney injury.

The technology has been implemented by a number of NHS organisations, including St Helen’s and KnowsleyWestern Sussex, and NHS Fife.

Patientrack said the acquisition by Alcidion would allow it to expand how it works with NHS hospitals with new products in complementary areas, such as patient flow, bed management, critical results, real time metrics and predictive analytics.

Alcidion’s Miya informatics platform consolidates real-time data from different healthcare IT systems and presents it to clinicians at the point of care, to help support decision-making. The cloud-based  platform also offers analytics tools to help professionals to manage clinical workflows, and logistics tools to help care teams work more efficiently.

Patientrack said new suite of products represented “a differentiated digital solution in the UK”.

Both Patientrack and Alcidion will continue to offer healthcare system integration, implementation and software support capabilities following the acquisition, and said services would remain “business as usual” for customers.

Donald Kennedy, managing director at Patientrack, who will continue to lead the organisation in the UK, added: “Becoming part of Alcidion Group is a very positive and progressive step that will allow us to meet even more of our customers’ objectives as they look to make more of the information they hold, and to better manage the patient journey.

“With a common goal of improving patient safety and efficiency of care, we now have a very real opportunity to draw on an even greater pool of skills and products to meet the needs of individual hospitals and the broader NHS. This is about maintaining and increasing the quality of our products and technological capabilities.”