Alcidion Group Limited (ASX:ALC) CEO and Director, Ray Blight talks about recent acquisitions and how this will deliver scale, international customers and better patient management in hospitals and emergency departments.Anna Napoli: Hello. I'm Anna Napoli for the Finance News Network. And joining me now from Alcidion Group Limited
(ASX:ALC) is CEO Ray Blight. Ray, welcome back.
Ray Blight: Thank you very much.
Anna Napoli: Alcidion operates patient management software to improve flow through hospitals. Can you tell us more?
Ray Blight: Alcidion's Miya Platform consolidates patient data from across the hospital. It might come from other health IT systems. It might come from medical devices. And it applies smarts to that patient data to convert it into what we call decision intelligence, which is then pushed to clinicians and other members of the care team to help them make better decisions about the patient's care. And we monitor the patient data right throughout the journey so that the patient is treated as quickly as possible, but with the goal being, you know, better health care, better clinical outcomes with the shortest time in hospital.
Anna Napoli: Thanks, Ray. Alcidion has been active with several acquisitions. Can you tell us about the acquisitions, starting with MKM Health?
Ray Blight: MKM Health is a general health IT services company. Originated from Australia. It's got a well-established customer base, not only here in Australia, but also in New Zealand and in the United Kingdom. In addition to services, it has an outstanding patient care product called Patientrack. Patientrack enables nurses at the bedside to digitally record patient observations, and those observations are automatically converted into early warning scores, which is an immediate signal to the nursing staff and to the clinical staff that a patient is deteriorating and requires immediate attention. And it's that early intervention into a deteriorating patient that gives a very high payoff in terms of quality of health care.
Anna Napoli: Okay. And what about Oncall Systems?
Ray Blight: Yes. So Oncall Systems is an acquisition that we completed early in 2018. They have a digital paging system that replaces the old-fashioned radio paging systems that are very widely used in Australia and New Zealand hospitals. So it's a new digital technology. It enables nurses to know which doctors are on duty in which roles, to instantly message them with a call for help, and with the Smartpage messaging via Oncall, the receiving doctor can get clinical data about the patient and start making their clinical judgments. We've now got a very significant footprint in New Zealand, but even more importantly, 30 new hospital customers in the National Health Service. That gives us great opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell. I also mentioned last year that we wanted to build ourselves a marketing capability. Through this acquisition, we will be doing that. Kate Quirke, who's the CEO of MKM, will become CEO of Alcidion Group, and she has achieved 25% plus compound annual growth rate in revenue over the last three to four years in MKM.
Anna Napoli: Now to sales and deployment, can you provide an update?
Ray Blight: On the Alcidion product side, we are well advanced on completing our first Miya patient flow and bed management installation, major installation in New Zealand. MKM have just announced that three of their major National Health Service clients in the UK have renewed their Patientrack contracts. So that's worth just over $900,000. And with Oncall Smartpage, we've completed our first Australian installation, so Smartpage is now up and running in the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne.
Anna Napoli: And Ray, when you last spoke to FNN, you talked about the improvement in patient handling in hospitals. Can you give us an example of some feedback you've had from hospitals?
Ray Blight: We've had stunning feedback around the Patientrack deployments, and that is the result of clinical trials, specific studies. And they have shown a 20% reduction in the time that the patient spends in hospital, an 80% reduction in cardiac arrests in hospitals, so that's the advantage of that early warning score solution, a 10% reduction in high-risk patients needing to go to the intensive care unit. And for nursing staff, with the Patientrack tool, a two-thirds reduction in the time that it takes them to record the patient's observations and calculate the early warning score. With the Oncall Smartpage product, the evidence from our New Zealand hospital customers is that it's saving doctors approximately 20 minutes per hour.
Anna Napoli: Last question, Ray. Why should investors consider adding Alcidion to their portfolios?
Ray Blight: Well, firstly because we've done what we said we would do late last year. Trebled our revenue, including doubling our annuity stream. Almost trebling our capacity to rapidly deploy our products into, you know, large hospital installations. We've now got a very, very credible sales and marketing workforce now as part of the Group with a great track record. 25% plus compound annual growth rate. And we are ready to hit the ground running with this MKM acquisition, and the evidence is that in the months that we've been negotiating this deal, we have actually integrated the Patientrack product into the Miya Platform. We've already demonstrated it to customers. We've had an excellent response to the combined product offering. And we're very confident that that's going to lead to an even greater compound annual growth rate in revenue.
Anna Napoli: Ray Blight, thank you for the update.
Ray Blight: Thank you.
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