iSoft named North West business of the year

Manchester-based supplier of clinical software, iSoft, has been named North West business of the year by the Manchester Evening News, in the category of businesses over £50m turnover.

The MEN Business of the Year Awards Programme covers companies of all sizes and takes into consideration clear vision of management performance, employee growth, customer service, innovation and risk management.

The judges said: “One of Manchester and the North West’s greatest success stories in recent years, iSoft is a dynamic business with world-beating potential. It has pulled off a challenging merger and is now weighing up a move into the US market.”

iSoft’s chief executive officer Tim Whiston said: “I am delighted to celebrate iSoft’s success by receiving the MEN Business of the Year Award. We have achieved international success while remaining grounded in the region that helped nurture and develop our business."

According to iSoft the MEN award came in response to a year in which it "successfully launched its market-leading Lorenzo software solutions into both existing and international markets". iSoft pointed to its ‘Global Innovation Partners’ Robert Bosch Hospital in Germany and Singapore Health as sites taking Lorenzo.

However, iSoft’s rather elastic use of Lorenzo as a catch-all term – variously used to describe its next generation clinical solution, its overall suite of clinical software products and underpinning architecture – makes it difficult to be clear what the company has launched into its prime existing market, the UK NHS.

An iSoft spokesperson confirmed to E-Health Insider that elements of the "Lorenzo service-orientated architecture" were currently being deployed in England, together with elements of the Lorenzo suite of clinical software products, such as iPIMS.

Within the NHS in England Lorenzo is synonymous with being the enterprise-wide, next generation clinical solution to be delivered under the NHS National Programme for IT, linking together healthcare systems, and enabling patient records and other information to be easily and securely shared by health professionals.

The Lorenzo software has been selected as the core patient administration and integrated clinical solution, delivered by Local Service Provider (LSP) prime contractors, for use in three of the five clusters of the English NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT).

The LSPs’ phased delivery of these integrated clinical solutions, from IDX, iSoft and Cerner, linked to a national ‘NHS spine’ infrastructure, is currently running at least 12 months late in each of the five clusters.

The iSoft spokesperson told EHI: "The comprehensive end-to-end solution has not gone in yet, the architecture is going in first."

The component of the NHS version of the integrated Lorenzo clinical solution thought to be at the most advanced stage of development is Lorenzo Primary Care, which was previewed at the iSoft National User Group meeting at the beginning of November.

In the absence of the fully integrated iSoft solution a number of sites within the three NPfIT clusters, that eventually plan to deploy Lorenzo, are understood to have begun implementing ‘existing’ iSoft solutions such as iPIMS, now badged as part of the Lorenzo product suite, to meet urgent needs.

In its last year of account, iSoft’s revenues grew to £262m, an increase of just over 75% from the previous year, and number of employees more than doubled from 1,338 to 3,000.