iSoft quadruples India staff

The UK-based healthcare IT services provider iSoft has quadrapuled its Indian headcount in the last five months to 850 employees and has plans to further scale up this number to 1,100 by the end of this fiscal.

It also has plans to consolidate its two offices with combined space of 70,000 sq ft in Chennai and move to a new 150,000 sq feet facility by March 2005.

The company, which has committed to invest $100 million in India for software product development over a three year period, has been developing, Lorenzo, a next generation healthcare software product, largely at Chennai.

"Chennai is our largest product development centre worldwide and all next generation software product development is driven out of our Chennai facility. We shall be releasing our latest healthcare software product Lorenzo in phases, the complete product will be released sometime in early 2007," said Ravan Boddu, CEO, iSoft.

Its key markets are reforming economies who are investing on patient centric healthcare like Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands and Norway. Lorenzo is targetted at patients, administrative staff at clinics, pharmacies, radiology departments, accident and trauma units.

iSoft has plans to leverage their partnership with digital cable operators in the UK to target senior citizens for their healthcare programmes to stream data through cable TV and also record data using cameras.

Doctors would monitor this data and make weekly visits to take care of the patients who sign up for this programme. iSoft which has 70 per cent of the IT healthcare software products market in Australia and 60 per cent of the market share in UK is targetting US and China next.

"We plan on entering the lucrative US market in the next two years through our worldwide technology and marketing alliance with Microsoft which we had inked in 2004. All our products are developed on the .Net platform making it a perfect match for Microsoft," added Boddu. iSoft's other worldwide partners include Accenture, EDS, Lockheed Martin and CSE.

iSoft supports and develops 15 products at its Chennai facility which is its largest globally. Its healthcare products operate in primary care, patient record, advanced clinical, pathology, pharmacy, booking and health record systems.

The flagship product set of iSoft is the i. series suite of healthcare IT products. Besides its Chennai facility it has development centres in Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland.