iSoft wins e-prescribing deal in Navarre

The Navarre flag

ISoft has won a one-year contract with the Spanish region of Navarre to provide the first stages of an e-prescribing system.

The contract win follows iSoft’s successful e-prescribing project in the Balearic Islands.

The company has also announced it has won new business as part of a consortium to upgrade the health IT systems of another unnamed Spanish regional healthcare services.

ISoft has won an initial one year contract worth €374,000 to develop e-prescription for the Navarra Healthcare Service in northern Spain. The company is working in partnership with Madrid-based information and technology services company IECISA.

E-prescription will eliminate paper prescriptions and therefore save time and costs, and help to avoid dispensing mistakes. It will also give doctors prescribing rules and lists of recommended drugs and automate invoicing and payments for pharmacists.

According to the company, the e-prescription system will be piloted at the Mendillorri and Mutilva health centres, the Navarra Hospital and 17 pharmacies this year, before being rolled out to 56 health centres and all 500 pharmacies throughout the region in 2010.

The new contract follows the completion of an e-prescription project for the Balearic Island Healthcare Service in December 2008. ISoft says that its Spanish e-prescription system is now used by 55 health centres and 411 pharmacies in Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera.

Guillermo Ramas, managing director of iSoft Spain, Portugal and Latin America, said: “The e-prescription project in the Balearic Islands is a huge success and now serves as a model for other healthcare services in Spain.”

In a separate €2.6m deal, for which the company declined to name the customer or partners, iSoft said it had been selected to develop clinical and patient management systems for an un-named Spanish region.

The company is a member of part an unnamed consortium providing an integrated healthcare system for 28 hospitals in a project totalling €12m over two years.

The consortium is said to be upgrading current systems and infrastructure to provide a common platform for all administrative, clinical and patient management functions and so improve the quality of healthcare services for 8m patients. When fully rolled out the system will be used by up to 82,000 healthcare professionals.

ISoft says the contract, which includes patient administration, theatres, electronic prescriptions and data warehousing systems and integration services, covers the initial two years of the project.