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Service AnyWare Group Inc.'s Roam system contract worth $4.29M

A Port City technology company has helped New Brunswick become the first jurisdiction in North America to implement a province or state-wide information sharing system for health-care workers, the provincial government announced Monday.

General practitioners, specialists, administrators and other health professionals can now access almost any medical information, that they are authorized to see, from any computer with Internet access because of AnyWare Group Inc.'s Roam system.

The contract is worth $4.29 million and secures the service for the next five-and-a-half years.

Wayne Chamberlain, AnyWare's vice-president of marketing, said the province-wide system can help reduce waiting time for treatment by making health-care providers more efficient.

"They're able to have specialists do consults remotely using the system," Chamberlain said.

This means a Miramichi doctor with a heart patient can more quickly consult a specialist in Saint John without having to wait for files to arrive or send the patient to another hospital.

Chaimberlain said the systems helps address the shortage of specialists in rural areas, by virtually making them closer and more accessible.

"The province now has the ability for these centres of excellence to reach out to all the outlying areas through this system," he said.

Chamberlain also said the system will help avoid expensive, unnecessary decisions that are made as a precaution.

A head injury victim in Woodstock could get scanned locally and get a consultation from a neurologist in Moncton to decide if the patient needs to be sent there.

"If he doesn't then you save that whole transportation cost and treatment cost," he said.

Roam allows doctors to use any of the software they would normally use to view files, such as x-rays, blood results and health records, from any computer or smart phone with a web browser, eliminating the need for the applications to be installed on every device.

This is a huge benefit to the IT division, which can add new applications to the system quickly and easily.

"You can imagine if you had one system to roll out provincially and you had to go install a piece of software on every health-care worker's PC or laptop, you can imagine how long that would take," Chamberlain said.

With Roam most new applications only take about a day to install on a master server.

"Then 15 seconds after that it can be rolled out to hundreds of health-care workers across the province," he said.

Chamberlain said the province hasn't provided him with an estimated time and cost savings Roam will bring, but suspects they won't know for some time.

Health Minister Mike Murphy was not available for comment Monday afternoon.

The system had been installed at each of the former eight regional health authorities since 2004, but now all health-care workers and their files are connected province-wide. More than 70 per cent of the doctors in New Brunswick are already using the system so Chamberlain said he doesn't expect a long transition period.

"With the province leading the way on this, it will give other prospects we're talking to a lot more confidence that this does work and the benefits are going to be real for doing it," he said.

Chamberlain said every jurisdiction in North America will eventually implement a similar system.

"This is something that all the health-care systems in Canada and eventually in the U.S. we believe are going to have to resolve," he said. "How do we get our health-care workers the information they need when and where they need it?"

He said he thinks an information-sharing system will eventually be build across Canada.

"They're starting by building systems at the provincial level and planning that these will connect together," Chamberlain said. "I definitely think Roam will have a big part to play in that."