Published on the 06/07/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson
Orion Health to provide solutions to Vinmec International Hospitals, signs a strategic partnership with VITCORP…
Things are looking up for healthcare technology company Orion Health. It has secured two new deals in Vietnam, which it says will build momentum and market presence in Southeast Asia.
The first is for the sale of its enterprise software, which is going into private Vinmec International Hospitals, initially across four separate sites, with later plans to extend it to an additional six hospitals within the group. The software is expected to improve the delivery and quality of care through a single view of patient records; no pricing information was put to the deal and CEO Ian McCrae said that will remain confidential.
In the second deal, announced simultaneously, Orion lifted the lid on a new partnership with Vietnamese outsource IT provider VIT Corporation (VITCORP), which it said will improve hospital efficiency and enhance the quality of healthcare in the public sector across several of the country’s provinces.
One of just five single-party states in the world with a communist-leaning government, Vietnam has a population of over 90 million people.
In a statement, Orion’s APAC senior VP Darren Jones said the agreement is pivotal to long-term success: “We see huge potential for our solutions throughout Vietnam. This partnership will help strengthen our market presence and provide a number of additional relationships and opportunities.”
Speaking with iStart, McCrae said that as one of the biggest industrial groups in Vietnam, VITCORP builds and operates hospitals in the country as part of its activities. “It will help with localisation and so on; it has great reach and people on the ground for service and support.”
The Orion product set itself, McCrae added, is already widely used in Southeast Asia, so language localisation doesn’t present a challenge.
In its statement, Orion said it is piloting delivery of eHealth solutions with VITCORP to public sector hospitals in Khanh Hoa province. However, McCrae said the ink on that deal is barely dry.
“We’re scoping that work now and the pilot is still a few months away. We’ll need to wait to see the benefits, but VITCORP does bring a big pipeline of hospitals as it is highly engaged in the public sector, which has around 1000 hospitals and 5 000 clinics,” he said.
A September 2014 report in The Economist points to an inefficient and problematic healthcare sector in the third world country, where despite reforms, corruption remains a problem. ‘The healthcare system, like the state-dominated economy, is limping. The 3% of GDP the state spends on the system (nearly half of total health spending) is not enough to improve health infrastructure’, it said.
The report further noted, ‘Hospitals have outdated facilities and maddeningly opaque bureaucracies. A law on health insurance passed in 2008, created to assist the poor and ethnic minorities, is far from comprehensive. But the government knows that providing proper health care is key to preventing the kind of social unrest that undermines its authority.’
Quizzed on whether or not there were peculiarities in doing business in Southeast Asia, McCrae chuckled. “There are peculiarities everywhere in the health industry, where there seem to be a lot of unusual billing and invoicing rules and processes. That’s the biggest challenge; while medical procedures are the same everywhere, the administration isn’t.”
