Cancer is a deadly disease with limited treatment options, difficult to cure and painful for patients and their families. To have a proper diagnosis for a chronic disease like cancer,it requires medical professionals to get all the information they need to accurately access the patient’s condition. By using cloud-powered software platforms, doctors around the world can gain access to patient data immediately and apply the necessary care without a delay. As an early adopter of cloud computing in healthcare, EpiSoft, a privately owned eHealth company based in Sydney, Australia has been able to create a positive change in the healthcare industry. EpiSoft is implementing patient management solutions made distinct by the use of a common platform to help clinical experts participate and share knowledge. The company is a major healthcare player in software-assisted chemotherapy-management and patient engagement. EpiSoft is committed towards building a connected, global healthcare community that allows clinicians to collaborate on care provision and research.
Headquartered in Brookvale, Sydney, the company started its journey in 2005 by two Australian Healthcare executives Jenny O’Neill and Michael Hurse, who anticipated a revolutionary change to collaboration and digitization in the healthcare industry. In 2005, when cloud computing was largely an unheard of concept for the Australian hospital market, the founders introduced cloud-powered chronic disease management software solutions in the aim to better understand and improve patient outcomes. EpiSoft was one of the first health-IT vendors to deliver such solutions via the cloud to Australian hospitals.
With rising healthcare costs, it is increasingly more important for care providers to advance their utilization of modern-IT infrastructure to ensure successful deployment of technology-based healthcare solutions. EpiSoft leverages and manages best-of-breed cloud computing infrastructure on behalf of its hospital customers to deliver it’s highly-available, cost-effective and flexible software solutions. Via its cancer management platform ‘EpiSoft’,which is used by infusion centers and specialists in all states of Australia, the company has a proven capability to address the universal need of chemotherapy providers to advocate for and implement effective, safe and consistent evidence-based care. Additionally, EpiSoft’s patient portal, “epi-me by EpiSoft (also marketed as “eAdmissions), offers hospitals a simple, secure and all-in-one platform to productivise the ‘front-of-house’ patient service experience by taking much of communication and information capture online, whilst simultaneously boosting patient engagement with their hospital’s processes.
EpiSoft enables cancer specialists to prescribe worldwide best-practices chemotherapy and immunotherapy guidelines natively within the system. These guidelinesare the evidenced-based, consensus-driven eviQ cancer protocols that include all the recommendations for supportive therapies as well as primary therapies from the Australian-based but world renowned New South Wales Cancer Institute. In addition to these, the company also allows hospitals to create their own locally developed treatment protocols or setup protocols for clinical trials. In addition, EpiSoft users are themselves contributing to a growing pool of real-world, standardised datasets of chemotherapy safety and efficiency.
EpiSoft’s CEO, Jenny,explains, ” Once a doctor prescribes a treatment plan to their patient, EpiSoft’s novel protocol engine EpiSteme(™) automatically takes over – medications are prescribed, doses are calculated, rounds of chemotherapy are booked at recommended intervals, diagnostic test orders and drug administration charts are prepared, supporting the care team to achieve the best outcome for their patient.
Fran Vaughan, a former project manager of the Sydney Adventist Hospital who oversaw EpiSoft’s implementation of its cancer management platform, remarks”it has made a tremendous positive impact on the work processes for the Centre. The EpiSoft Project was implemented successfully with the on-boarding of all 90 accredited doctors and hospital staff and has achieved successful business and clinical outcomes…the PDIC and SAH now meet international standards for the delivery of chemotherapy medications ensuring each and every complex infusion protocol is approved and administered to specification and any variations fully documented.
EpiSoft’s patient portal, “epi-me by EpiSoft offers hospitals, patients and families a highly-engaging, online ‘one-stop-shop’ experience to streamline their communications with the hospital and their care team. Instead of filling out clipboards in a busy waiting room, patients can take the time to enter accurate, timely and high-quality personal and health information from the comfort of their own home.
In 2019, EpiSoft’s celebrates the millionth patient admission processed on its patient portal which is now used by 60+ hospitals in Australia.
EpiSoft strives to differentiate itself from its competitors through its customer service.
Operating a true ‘software-as-a-service’ methodology, EpiSoft believes that the software solution should be tailored to the workflow of the hospital, not the other way around. The company has planned its roadmap well into the future- its next generation technology will make its software easier to scale to new customers allowing them to get started on our software themselves with standard configurations to select from, such as for a chemotherapy infusion centre or acute medical-surgical hospital. The other natural next step for the company is to access a large volume of real-world data with the help of advanced artificial intelligence to ‘learn’ the patterns of toxicities and effectiveness of care in order to predict better outcomes of treatment.
The future looks bright as the company aims to disrupt the healthcare technology market further in Australia and abroad. The EpiSoft team prides itself on an agile and efficient customer support model that prioritizes patient safety above all else, leveraging a true ‘software as a service’ regular release model that it believes has made it successful in continuing to innovate to meet the changing needs of our customers. After 8 years, two major platform upgrades and nationwide expansion, all of EpiSoft’s patient portal enabled hospitals remain customers and continue to be highly engaged with the company’s technology roadmap.
