New Zealand Healthcare Companies Looking for New Markets with US Investors – 90% of Their GPs Use Electronic Medical Records

New Zealand is a highly motivated Health IT country.  Back in September I posted about one of their companies who has partnered with a US company in Dallas that is working on a external power supply for all your devices.  Have you ever thought of your body as a wireless platform, well neither have I, but there’s work in progress here across the continents. 

Implantable Devices Getting Wireless External Power Supplies – Bionic Man/Woman

I communicate with a physician, Dr. Graham Chiu in New Zealand who recently was featured in a Brunei newspaper with his lecture on “How to Make the Most of Electronic Medical Records”.  We met though another medical records site a few years ago when I was still tinkering around with writing my EMR and thus so have compared some notes along the way. 

Back a few years ago I don’t think either one of us had been able to predict in just a matter of a few short years on how medical records would evolve to where we are today.  Here’s a few lines from the article mentioned above:

“Dr Chiu, a rheumatologist consultant from New Zealand, said that if a country wants to invest in the EMR, the first and foremost thing to do is develop an IT infrastructure.
"You need to have basic IT support systems and professional IT personnel who can help. You need to get your physicians to know how to use it too," he said.

Other setbacks include needing a computer literate person to use the EMR because they cannot use it if they do not have the skills. "There is a high requirement for strong technical support. If you don't have support, then the systems won't work and you need back up."
Security considerations also need to be considered as putting data into EMR can be open to people hacking into the database, he added.”

Over a year ago I wrote about Graham using some of the formatting of the Microsoft Common User Interface.  He’s not even writing in a Microsoft language, but yet has worked at using the same screen formatting, again with everything in the same place which can really be helpful for physicians working are more than one facility and using more than one EHR system.

Common User Interface – EHR Development Work in Progress

“Recently I posted about the Common User Interface from Microsoft and I spoke with a developer in New Zealand, Synapse, who has done some integration work with the interface.  Graham Chiu of Synapse, is a physician as well as a developer so  he is one busy person and nice to see a physician to be able to find the time for software development.” 

New Zealand seeks 'medical tourists'

We have also recently talked about New Zealand and their efforts with medical tourism too and Graham said the hospital was very good place and where he was born.  The long and short of all of this is that there are other countries and very smart companies and people looking to attract US investors on what they feel they can bring to market to improve healthcare. 

Arizona Man Travels to New Zealand for Shoulder Surgery – Cost was 1/6 of US Customary Charges

The group of companies making their way here to the US shows how we need to keep up on our front as well as the global economy is affecting how healthcare technology is used.  You can see here Dr. Halamka from Harvard is on the panel in Boston taking a look at what technologies they have to offer who is a perfect panel expert as he gets out there hands on beyond a proof of concept in almost everything he does.  BD 

BOSTON – Nine healthcare information technology companies from New Zealand are taking a tour of the United States, in hopes of finding new markets for their products and getting a piece of the American healthcare reform pie.

The companies, chosen from 104 that participated in the New Zealand Trade & Enterprise Agency’s year-long “Focus on Health Challenge,” are visiting San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C. and Boston this month. They were selected by a seven-member international panel that included Harvard Medical School’s John Halamka and Jay Srini of Lifewire and SCS Ventures.

“New Zealand has the agility, as a small country, to expedite innovation in a way that larger countries, with multiple rules, regulations and bureaucratic processes, have difficulty doing,” Srini says on the New Zealand Trade & Enterprise Web site.

The companies currently touring the United States are:

• Airway, which has developed a high-fidelity, virtual reality bronchoscopy simulator designed to teach doctors safe airway management in difficult patients;
• B2P, a developer of products that enable the quick identification of bacterial contamination at all stages of the supply chain;
• Comprehensive Health, which has developed GASP (Giving Asthma Support to Patients), a Web-based clinical assessment and decision support tool for asthma management.
• Emendo, whose CapPlan software solutions are designed to help hospitals plan, monitor and manage unscheduled emergency patients as well as scheduled elective patients;
• INR Online, which offers an online platform that enables patients to manage their own Warfarin treatment plan from home, while still under close medical supervision;
• Matakina Technology, a developer of breast image analysis software;
• Mesynthes, whose Endoform Infection Control is a proprietary, ready-to-use tissue substitute for wound care and soft tissue reconstruction;
• Pictor, which has developed diagnostic technology for testing blood and other biological samples for a number of disease and infectious agents; and
• SIMTICS, which has developed a PC-based learning environment designed to integrate a virtual reality simulator with text, 3D interactive anatomy and high-definition video from experts.

New Zealand healthcare companies tour U.S. in search of investors, customers | Healthcare Finance News

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