CompuGroup restructures

CompuGroup’s subsidiary systema is integrating its hospital information system and rehabilitation and social care IT business. The ultimate goal is to bring together the different IT-solutions in the portfolio and to put them onto a single technological platform.

CompuGroup took over systema, which has around 100 hospital customers in Austria and Eastern Europe, last year, so it could gain a foothold in the Central European HIS market.

CompuGroup also took over fliegel, which brought with it nearly 200 hospital customers in Germany, earlier this year. And in July, it acquired of All for One, which brought some 350 rehabilitation hospitals and 3,000 social care facilities as new customers.

Following all these takeovers, it now has the task of bringing its business together. CompuGroup’s management has opted for integration instead of leaving the companies as separate entities with separate products.

“There will be three product lines in the future”, said Frank Brecher, head of systema, in an interview with E-Health Europe. The first one is “systema.akut” which encompasses the HIS business. The second one is “systema.reha” for the rehab IT business. And finally there is “systema.sozial” for the social care IT business.

The different IT solutions will gradually converge technologically, Brecher added. But he stressed that this had to be imagined as a gradual process. “There won’t be new software. Each customer’s IT solution will be developed further. There will be a slow but steady harmonisation.”

This approach marks a departure for CompuGroup. In the market for IT solutions for doctors in private practice, for example, it took over several competitors, but did not fully integrate the businesses. All the companies in this sector remained independent – and still are.

However, in the hospital business, Brecher said: “At the moment, we have the problem that many customers don’t actually know what CompuGroup has to offer to them, since there are so many differnet solutions and names. This is about to change.

“Apart from systema.akut, sytema.reha, and systema.sozial there might also be a product like systema.mawi for the logistics IT solution and other comparable product lines for further subsystems soon.”

There will also be a reorganisation of the systema management. While Frank Brecher remains executive president of systema, his co-exec Holger Rostek will leave the company. Rostek was head of All for One; one of the bigger success stories in the German health IT market.

“The doors at CompuGroup remain open for him”, said Brecher, who also denied that the restructuring was linked to a recent profit warning that CompuGroup had to issue in summer. “The problems lie in our business with health insurance companies, not in the business with health providers.”