Auckland-based health software company, i-Health, is offering a complete electronic prescribing and medication reference solution to District Health Boards around the country.

i-Health's chief executive Brian Allen says the challenge has been to find a way to make information about the patient, and the medications to be prescribed, available to clinicians in a fast, easy-to-use electronic form.

He says adverse medical reactions relating to the incorrect administering of drugs are a considerable problem. A Ministry of Health study of more than 6500 medical records in 13 New Zealand public hospitals showed 12.9% of admissions were associated with adverse reactions to medication, either in or out of hospital.

The new software puts the most up-to-date - New Zealand specific - drug information at clinicians' fingertips and replaces cumbersome manuals and pocket handbooks. Doctors can use the software either at a terminal in the hospital ward, or at the patient's bed side using a handheld PDA device.

Allen says, with all those components in place, it is one more step towards a fully online prescribing process. This includes the ability to view a patient's current medication profile and prescription history, update a patient's medication history, check prescriptions against known patient drug allergies and sensitivities, check for adverse drug interactions, match prescriptions against a clinic or hospital's preferred medicines list, and print outpatient prescriptions, inpatient drug charges, and all the required labels.

Brian Allen says the full solution has required a collaboration between three health software companies: i-Health and Medimedia from New Zealand, and HATRIX from Australia.

Medimedia is the developer of a New Zealand drugs database tailored to the New Zealand hospital sector, and designed for delivery to clinicians at the point of care. The database, is called MIMS (Medication Index of Medical Specialities).

HATRIX, based in Canberra, is the developer of the web viewer necessary to view the MIMS database online, and the developer of electronic prescribing and drug administration solutions.

Both MIMS and HATRIX have been integrated by i-Health into their web-based Clinician View software. The i-Health Clinician View provides clinicians in hospitals with a user-friendly, web-based interface that is designed to 'work the way clinicians work'.

Further information about these three companies is available at their web sites:
- i-Health
- Hatrix
- Medimedia