SOFT LAUNCH: (l-r) Fiumicelli, Cohen and iSOFT president and chief executive officer for Asia Dr Wim Botermans at the soft launch of Lorenzo.

iSOFT GROUP Plc has brought its next-generation healthcare solution, Lorenzo, into the Asian market. Currently used by healthcare providers in Europe, including Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, iSoft claims Lorenzo is able to improve the delivery of healthcare services to patients.

Lorenzo stores patient records ­electronically, helping healthcare providers to easily access the information they need in order to properly treat a patient and can be used in all segments of the healthcare industry.

“The system can handle anything from 100 records in a private practice to about 90 million records in hospitals,” Gary Cohen, iSoft executive chairman and chief executive officer, said in Kuala Lumpur recently.

This fast access allows healthcare providers to quickly retrieve medical records before administering treatment, which can be useful to first responders and emergency room personnel where time is of the essence.

“Getting all of a patient’s available records to doctors (during an emergency or treatment) will help them make fast and more accurate decisions,” said Andrea Fiumicelli, chief ­operating officer of iSoft’s parent company, IBA Health Group Ltd.

Lorenzo was developed using service-oriented architecture and delivers the flexibility necessary to connect people and processes in a healthcare supply chain.

“Because it is also an open architecture, healthcare providers can develop other ­solutions around Lorenzo that will make their service delivery more efficient,” Cohen said.

Fiumicelli added that Lorenzo can sit in an existing IT infrastructure within the healthcare organisation to enhance its services — negating the need to invest in new infrastructure.

Research and development works for Lorenzo started in 2004 as a key solution for Britain’s National Programme for Information Technology (NpfIT).

The programme transformed Britain’s National Health Service by pooling the health records of its 50 million patients.

Cohen said iSoft spent about A$500mil (RM1.2bil) to develop Lorenzo and is planning to spend the equivalent of RM300mil to further improve it.

And since patient records are allowed to float around within the platform, iSoft said privacy measures have been built in to allow only authorised personnel to have full access to the medical histories.

“Lorenzo was designed with privacy in mind and adheres to the stringent privacy laws in Britain,” Cohen said.

Lorenzo is built with three levels of security, Fiumicelli said. The first level is user identity discovery and management, which monitors who is logging into Lorenzo.

The second is Persona log-in. “Depending on who you are — whether a care giver, a nurse or a doctor — you will be able to access information which the patient has allowed you to access,” Fiumicelli said.

The third level is related to patient consent and data integrity, which includes a ­mechanism for the patient to set who can access and ­modify information in Lorenzo and ensures the data is transferred and modified according to best practices in the industry.

“So if someone were to modify the information in Lorenzo, the patient would be able to track who did it and when,” Cohen said.

Malaysia is high on iSoft’s list of countries in Asia for the adoption of Lorenzo. Other countries include Singapore, Thailand, China and Hong Kong.