Mastek joins hands with UK health firm

Building on its strong base of healthcare expertise, Mastek will invest in the healthcare segment as it expands its offerings and explores new markets. It has tied-up with a British company in the healths services' products segement towards this end.

Ravindra Kadam, head (Solutions and Strategy), Mastek, told Business Standard: "We have tied up with a British company in health services products to enter into the clinical portals market.

"We are also in talks with various trusts and hospitals in the US for providing them with clinical portal and are looking at specialist healthcare partners in the US."

The clinical portal will provide registered patients the facilities to check their medical records online, take appointments online and support other such similar day-today activities between the patient and the hospital.

It may be recalled that Mastek is a consortium partner with BT Syntegra and in 2004 it had bagged a $50 million, 10-year contract for the National Programme for IT within the UK's National Health Services (NHS) System.

BT is the National Application Service provider for NHS of UK, designing, delivering and managing a national patient record database and transactional messaging service which is critical to the NHS Care Records Service.

As a clinical portals provider, Mastek which works at the NHS spine level as systems integrator maintaining business applications can now move upto the Local Service Provider (LSP) level. LSPs directly provide day-to-day operational services to hospitals.

There are five LSPs in NHS, with UK divided into four zones North East, North West, South East and South West and London. According to industry sources there is a strong likelihood that Mastek could get into clinical system for London LSP which is the operational area of BT.

But, the company official did not comment on the possibility. After winning the BT contract, Mastek has over the last two years built applications on top of the NHS System.

Last year the company launched drug to drug interaction system, where by a patients medication history is stored and every time the patient gets a new prescription, the system sends an alert if there are conflicting drugs to the patients history prescribed.

Currently, it is in advanced stages of talks for building a system which will monitor moments of old people through electronic sensors. The system will send alerts if there is no activity for a certain specified period of time.

The system would also check blood pressure at home thus providing a telecare and home care facility for the aged.