Alcidion Group Limited (ASX:ALC) Executive Chairman & CEO, Ray Blight, talks FY17 results, adoption of the company's Miya playform and the market for hospital patient management systems.Jessica Amir: Hi. I’m Jessica Amir for the Finance News Network. Joining me now from Alcidion Group Limited
(ASX:ALC) is Executive Chairman and CEO, Ray Blight. Hi Ray, welcome.
Ray Blight: Thank you.
Jessica Amir: First up, for those new to the company, can you give us a quick introduction on why your services are so unique?
Ray Blight: We build clinical intelligence, which we supply to doctors and nurses and other care providers at the point of care, including at the bedside, so that they understand the patient’s clinical condition, changes in the patient’s complexity. And then we provide guidance to them on how, in accordance with clinical best practice, they can make the best decisions for their patients. It’s unique because we’re able to automate best clinical practice, approved clinical protocols developed in the best schools around the world, and provide that on an iPad.
Jessica Amir: Turning to financials now, what were some of the highlights from FY17?
Ray Blight: FY17 was a year of consolidation for us, where we were able to bring on our first international contract, a major public hospital in New Zealand. We were also able to enter the private hospital sector in Australia, initially with relatively modest proof-of-concept projects. But we’re very optimistic from that FY17 work to create much larger opportunities in the private sector going forward.
We also expanded our product range in two ways: through a new extension to our core asset, the Miya platform, which takes it into the realm of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics; and the second way was by entering into agreements with other health software developers to integrate their product set into ours, thus enhancing the value and utility of our core offerings.
Jessica Amir: Ray, now to sales and deployments, what can you tell us is happening there?
Ray Blight: Our focus will remain on the public sector, where approximately 60% of Australia’s capacity is deployed. Our customer base there is solid. We have major public hospitals, high credibility. We’re going to be building on that.
But, equally importantly, in the private sector, which has about 40% of Australia’s hospital capacity, we’ve completed proof-of-concept projects that we’re now putting sales and marketing effort behind, to ramp up rapid growth in the private hospital sector.
Jessica Amir: A more general question now, Ray: what’s the current state of patient management and what’s the scope for improvement?
Ray Blight: So, in western societies, the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, after cancer and heart disease, avoidable, preventable errors occurring during the delivery of healthcare is the third-largest killer. So there is a huge potential for improvement. If we can help care teams make better decisions faster, then they can start to redress that huge opportunity of eliminating preventable errors.
Jessica Amir: Last question now, what can investors expect from Alcidion in terms of news flow and what’s the long-term ambition for the company?
Ray Blight: Our long-term ambition is rapid and continuous growth in revenue. Our news flow over the next 12 months will illustrate our progress on that front, and that progress will come from a number of channels.
Our M&A work, we’ve been very active looking at other companies with synergistic products to ours, with a customer base that we can upsell into, and we are very confident that we’ll be making positive announcements around our M&A work.
That, amongst other activities, will take us into new international markets. We’ve been focused on the North American market and the UK market, so we are expecting to announce entry to one of those markets. We expect to be announcing a very significant growth in revenue, from both organic growth from our entry into the private sector market, but also through our M&A activity.
Jessica Amir: Ray Blight, very exciting horizon. Thanks so much for the update. Looking forward to the rest of FY18.
Ray Blight: Thank you very much.
Ends
