In these days of a stampede into the UK healthcare market (CI Nos 1,184, 1,181) it is refreshing to find a specialist laboratory software company that not only stresses quality of product and prefers to distance itself from systems used in privatised US hospitals, but also has no intention of offering catch-all hospital packages. Such a company is Community Health Computing (UK) Ltd, the far smaller and younger subsidiary of its US parent, Community Health Computing Inc. The US company has a mutually exclusive deal with Stratus Computer Inc whereby it offers its products solely on Stratus hardware and in return it is Stratus’ only healthcare VAR. Community Health chose Stratus machines because of their multiprocessor architecture which provides a high volume, fault tolerant transaction processing system. At that time (1983) Stratus saw itself primarily as a hardware company in the financial and business applications markets and took little notice of its potential penetration of the healthcare market. Nowadays, however, thanks to Community Health, 110 hospitals in the US have Stratus systems running Community Health’s products. This is a pattern which the UK sides of both businesses wish to repeat following the NHS White Paper. The key to such penetration are the two products LabCare and RadCare. LabCare controls and records the results of patient samples through the various stages of their clinical testing in the various pathology labs of a hospital. The system can be linked to analysers, results and hospital patient administration systems, presenting test results in wards and laboratories as soon as they are available. RadCare is a similar system for controlling radiology department reports which, with its picture archive communication system, can get X-rays on clinicians’ workstations. The turnkey systems are about UKP500,000 each. As regards the general packages on the market, Community Health’s Martin Whittaker’s coy comment was that they can’t usually cope with laboratory contract requirements. However, he was adamant that both LabCare and RadCare could be fully integrated with most general hospital systems, saying that in the US 75 proprietary systems had been integrated with 45 different types of general systems. So far in the UK the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary and Islington’s Whittington Hospital have taken the LabCare systems, and two more contracts are being negotiated.
