London, 24th March, 2011 - Pathology laboratories across Europe are set to have access to faster and more cost effective IT, thanks to a new partnership between Orion Health Ltd and CliniSys. 

Orion Health’s Rhapsody Integration Engine will be embedded in CliniSys’ systems to create faster and easier connections between its pathology solutions and 3rd party health information systems. The use of Rhapsody will allow CliniSys customers to accelerate project lead-times for integration with external systems and lower overall operating costs. 

CliniSys recognises the growing requirements for integration and interoperability and how integration to order communication and results reporting systems particularly are now seen as mission critical services.

This new partnership offers customers the breadth of experience of CliniSys in pathology laboratory IT, alongside flexible IT integration provided by Orion Health, a specialist with 15 years expertise in building integration platforms for healthcare settings worldwide.

Rhapsody is a powerful integration engine that delivers advanced inter-system messaging and enables quick, accurate and efficient exchange of electronic data to populate electronic health records. The Rhapsody Engine manages and streamlines message exchange between healthcare applications, databases and external systems.

CliniSys is Europe’s largest dedicated pathology solutions provider with a suite of laboratory solutions all of which are supportive of interoperable IT connectivity essential for the drive for greater efficiency highlighted in Lord Carter’s report and the QIPP agenda. 

Charles Scatchard, President of International at Orion Health, said: “Europe’s healthcare economies increasingly rely on interoperable information, at all levels of health delivery. The partnership between Orion Health Rhapsody and an industry leader like CliniSys will reduce costs for pathology providers by lowering the overheads associated with creating and maintaining interfaces. At a time when operating budgets are tight, the cost-saving element of this partnership will prove immensely valuable.” 

Fiona Pearson, CEO of CliniSys said “Diagnostics data forms 70% of a patient’s electronic record and therefore it is essential that a laboratory information system can seamlessly integrate with other clinical systems.  As care pathways develop, this integration requirement becomes more complex requiring a greater level of process interoperability.  Our partnership with Orion Health will enable us to deliver more sophisticated levels of interoperability to our customers and provide them with increased levels of independence to adapt their interfaces to the changing clinical processes.”

Rhapsody is a powerful integration engine that delivers advanced inter-system messaging capabilities to health organisations of all kinds. Rhapsody is designed for rapid, effortless installation and use, and enables quick accurate and efficient exchange of electronic data to populate electronic health records. The strengths of Rhapsody™ are the ability to integrate around existing systems – and translate a wide range of message types (HL7 2.3/2.4;XML; HTML; EDI) and support a range of transport protocols. With a drag and drop graphical interface, Rhapsody™ gives users, a fully configurable system, making it highly flexible and easy to use.

Orion Health’s easy-to-use solutions and applications improve patient care and clinical decision-making by providing integrated health data in a single, unified view. By enhancing existing healthcare information systems, the Orion Health Rhapsody™ Integration Engine, Clinical Portal and clinical workflow solutions, provide healthcare workers with easy access to patient data and trends, and reduce errors and omissions by streamlining information transfer. 

Worldwide, Orion Health implements health information communities involving over 30 million patients with hundreds of thousands of active users including NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Spain’s IB Salut, South-Eastern Norwegian Regional Health Authority, New Zealand Ministry of Health, Maine’s HealthInfoNet, Lahey Clinic, UCLA Medical Center, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Alberta Health Services. Orion Health’s partners include leading health system integrators and IT vendors such as Accenture, Allscripts, IBM, Oracle, Philips and others.

The CliniSys Group has been successfully developing and deploying laboratory IT systems for 25 years. 1987 saw the first system go live in a private laboratory in Belgium shortly followed by a private laboratory in the UK. This was the start of rapid growth in North East Europe with the group expanding across the UK and Belgium, into Ireland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Twenty years later, CliniSys is the market leader in all of these territories. Headquartered in Chertsey, Surrey, CliniSys currently provides systems to in excess of 2,000 laboratories across 30 countries and employs some 230 dedicated pathology IT professionals. Please visit www.clinisys.co.uk for more information.