By Business & Finance Sláinte Healthcare, the leading international healthcare technology company and participant in the Health Innovation Hub has announced the creation of up to 80 new jobs in the coming year.
The new roles will be created in addition to the 40 jobs the company has created in Ireland this year to date. The jobs will be created in software engineering, testing, business analysis, client administration, finance and marketing.
Sláinte Healthcare was established in 2006 and since 2008 it has grown by over 1500%. The company provides innovative software that drives efficiencies and reduces costs in hospitals and healthcare organisations by enabling them to migrate to paperless systems. Headquartered in Sandyford in Dublin, Sláinte currently employs over 90 people across its offices in Ireland, the Middle East, Australia and the UK.
Sláinte Healthcare was one of the first group of participants in the Health Innovation Hub, an initiative launched jointly by the Department of Health and Children and the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. The company is working in partnership with the Hub to pilot its ‘Intelligent Paperless Chart’ product, ‘Vitro’ in the Cystic Fibrosis and Wound Care Clinic in Cork University Hospital (CUH).
Andrew Murphy, chief executive, Sláinte Healthcare, says: “At Sláinte Healthcare we believe that when it comes to healthcare, good enough is never good enough. Our success is largely down to the fact that we relish solving seemingly intractable problems – our aim is to understand at a very granular level, the endemic issues in healthcare that we try to solve with our software.”
“An example of one of the seemingly intractable problems we have solved relates to health insurance claims. When the company was founded, there was nothing but a paper process for hospitals and insurers to handle the complex process of submitting and reimbursing health insurance claims. Now over €1bn worth of claims are processed annually through our systems, greatly reducing transaction costs for all parties. This figure will continue to grow in coming years.”
On its participation in the Health Innovation Hub, Murphy comments: “We felt it was an important initiative to participate in the Hub and align the objectives of industry and the health system to mutual benefit. We have had tremendous engagement with CUH through the Innovation Hub that has led to the first of our Irish implementations of Vitro, to complement the success we’ve had with the same platform in other markets such as Australia and the Middle East.”
Sláinte Healthcare offers two unique products which have been created to address a technological gap in the paper-reliant healthcare sector. In Ireland, Sláinte Healthcare is working in partnership with the HSE to roll out its flagship product, Claimsure to hospitals throughout the country. Claimsure automates the health insurance revenue cycle process for hospitals, from patient admission through to final payment, incorporating options for automating the clinician and hospital billing process to complement the electronic claims functionality. It currently operates in over 35 public and private hospitals in Ireland and processes over €1bn worth of claims per annum.
Sláinte Healthcare’s innovative software Vitro, the Intelligent Paperless Chart, allows hospitals to move from costly and inefficient paper patient charts to electronic versions without the cost and upheaval associated with traditional EPR (Electronic Patient Record) system implementations.
Vitro creates electronic replicas of the existing paper based forms and adds intelligence by applying data validation and workflow rules. By capturing data electronically in the format that the hospital clinicians have already defined in their existing paper processes, it increases user adoption. Vitro has been rolled out to hospitals internationally in Australia and the Middle East. It has improved quality and efficiencies in hospitals by reducing the margin for error and risk. It is currently being piloted in the Cystic Fibrosis and Wound Care clinics in CUH in Cork.
Commenting on Vitro, Murphy said: “These days, our Vitro platform is addressing a global problem that has direct impact on the quality and effectiveness of patient care. We have invested significantly in our research and development to use Vitro to bring healthcare systems onto an electronic record, in a way that is easy and enticing for the clinician to work with, rather than something that adds a huge amount of administration to already busy health workers. The fact that we have so rapidly gained traction in multiple geographies means that we can continue to re-invest to ensure the company continues to grow and make a difference to how healthcare is delivered and funded.”
Sláinte Healthcare was recently ranked third in Deloitte’s 50 fastest growing companies for 2013 and in the top 100 of the ‘Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2013’. The company was nominated for Enterprise of the Year in the Business and Finance Enterprise of the Year Awards 2013.
