AxSys wins major Scottish system contract

 AxSys Technologies has been named as the successful bidder in NHSScotland’s national generic clinical system (GCS) procurement.

The Clydebank-based company will deliver a national licence for its product, Excelicare, and provide supporting services as part of the GCS contract.

The overall aim is to provide NHSScotland with the tools to create a diverse set of local clinical systems that support different specialties but, crucially, to ensure that all of them underpinned by common standards and standard interfaces and facilities.

Ron Anderson, interim director of IM&T, information services, National Services Scotland explained: “The ability to develop clinical systems in support of diverse specialties but with a common platform and a common core will provide an important step forward in support of patient care, and will undoubtedly be of great benefit.”

Excelicare is currently being used to support a large managed clinical network (MCN) for gynaecological cancer in the West of Scotland and the MCN for cleft lip and palate disorders.

AxSys managing director, Dr Pradeep Ramayya, a former consultant anaesthetist, said: “We are standardising what we have already done on a national scale. People can see something that has been running for two years.”

He told E-Health Insider there had been huge interest in the GCS and the response so far had been very positive. “Clinicians themselves are coming up with the requirements. That’s why we have been successful – we work with the clinicians.”

Dr Ramayya started developing clinical applications back in the 1980s, combining a career in anaesthesia with his special interest in IT until he co-founded AxSys in 2000. The company now employs 115 people in Scotland and Hyderabad, India.

NHS National Services Scotland describe Excelicare as ‘a powerful toolset-based application that allows the creation of highly-tailored clinical systems to reflect the complex working patterns of clinicians across the healthcare spectrum.’

It supports advanced telecommunication, multi-media and decision support technologies within an electronic patient record framework.

As part of the new GCS contract Excelicare will be integrated into the national Scottish Care Information (SCI) products including SCI Store and SCI Gateway. SCI Store will be used to populate GCS-based clinical systems with demographic data and laboratory results. SCI Gateway will be used to communicate XML-based documents to support referral and discharge between primary care and hospital departments.