As recently reported (CI No 1,181), a new British company, Hospital Computers Ltd, has been set up to partner National Health Service hospitals seeking self-governing status. The companies involved are London EC4-based Atlantic Medical (part of the British & Commonwealth subsidiary Atlantic Computers), Medical Computer Services of Newbury, Berkshire, and Bioplan, based in Chelsea, which is a supplier of facilities for joint National Health Service and private patient use. While these businesses will continue to function independently, they have established this joint venture to market Medical Computer Services’ integrated hospital information system Medax. The system is already up and running in 70 independent hospitals and is being used to manage pay beds in such famous institutions as Guy’s Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital. The software is written by Medical Computer Services, is Unix-based and, at the moment, is marketed with MIPS Computer Systems RISC equipment. Negotiations are, however, currently under way to sell Medax on Bull’s hardware. Hospital Computers claims that its system can reduce the costs of hospital computerisation by approximately 50%. Since the current estimate for each hospital’s resource management system is running at around UKP2m this is an attractive proposition. It is made even more attractive by the company’s offer to acquire a system for clients and then lease or rent it to them. The terms for this service, however, were not disclosed. One reservation about Medax is that it appears to be more of a resource measurement than a resource management system. It is geared to auditing and budgeting tasks rather than to helping clincians make judgements about care and treatments. To be fair, however, this seems to be a problem that is endemic in the resource management systems currently available (CI No 1,178) and the Medax package does appear to be less expensive than competing packages from the leading computer companies. The message from Hospital Computers was that there was no need to look abroad for the software solution to hospital resource management, because a viable system is already in operation in the UK. That may be so but its method for achieving resource allocation and cost control is designed around diagnostic related groups, which is also the basis of the criticised US system.
