The Rise of Altera Digital Health in Australia

Altera Digital Health is a global healthcare IT company, a member of the N. Harris Computer Corporation family, and one of the most prolific healthcare IT solution providers in Australia with hundreds of hospitals and care sites across Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Waikato, New Zealand — leveraging its technology to improve patient care.

Altera Digital Health, then known as Allscripts, entered the Australian market in 2010 when, after an extensive tender process, it was selected by South Australia (SA) Health to deliver an electronic medical record (EMR) solution across the state.

SA Health and Altera Digital Health have gone on to roll out what is arguably the most ambitious project of its kind in Australia — to deliver a connected community of health across the vast state. Fast forward to 2023 and SA Health is one of Altera Digital Health’s largest global Sunrise™ clients using prime solutions including Sunrise™ PAS, Sunrise EMR, Altera Patient Flow™ and Altera Opal.

The Sunrise platform in South Australia now has more than 7,000 concurrent users managing close to 3M registered patients and more than 20M patient visits. It is live at all metropolitan health sites positioning Adelaide as the digital health capital of Australia.

In 2016, Altera Digital Health had also acquired a small Adelaide-based healthcare IT company to add to its on-the-ground manpower in South Australia. The company was known for a highly effective scanning solution operational in dozens of Western Australian and Victorian hospitals. This solution, now known as Altera Opal, continues to be deployed across Australia and indeed globally.

Altera Digital Health’s footprint then extended to Victoria where it was selected to deliver an EMR solution to the Gippsland Health Alliance (GHA) in late 2017. Altera Digital Health’s focus on innovation and its cloud partnership with Microsoft has enabled the GHA to benefit from the most contemporary solutions available globally, hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud.

In December 2022, Altera Digital Health announced that the third phase of GHA’s EMR roll out had gone live with the Sunrise EMR clinical suite fully live across GHA’s major regional and subregional health services. The system is Australia’s largest EMR deployment on Microsoft Azure and incorporates 600 beds across five health services in total.

Another initiative born in 2017 was Project iRAD (integrated Real-time Active Data), of the South Western Sydney Primary Health Network, which is now pioneering open, connected health communities in Australia. Delivered through Altera Digital Health’s dbMotion™ Solution, Project iRAD solves the problem of scattered patient health information across many systems and sites. It aggregates and harmonises patient consented data from Australian primary care clinical information systems, delivering the information clinicians need in a usable and actionable format at the point of care.

The project initiated in 2018 and has expanded across 70 health services in South Western Sydney and Western New South Wales. Information available within iRAD includes medications, allergies, pathology results, radiology, immunisations, conditions, encounters and more. The system has recorded and shared information relating to 15,500+ allergies, 60,000+ medications, 48,000+ conditions and 5,200+ procedures.

Following the success of Project iRAD, in February 2023, Altera Digital Health was announced the winner of a competitive tender to deliver the Victorian Department of Health’s state-wide Health Information Exchange (HIE) solution, which will share health information across disparate systems for clinical care. The platform will initially provide hospital clinicians with a more complete view of a patient’s public pathology results with the option to expand to other clinical information.

Altera Digital Health has established itself as a leading health-tech innovator in Australia and New Zealand that can establish and grow long-term, meaningful relationships with its clients to bring next-level healthcare within reach.

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