Acquisition drives Pro Medicus into GP desktop market

Australia's leading medical IT and e-health provider Pro Medicus Limited [ASX:PME] today announced that it has acquired the intellectual property to a clinical records system which will enable the company to aggressively compete in the GP desktop space currently serviced by HCN's Medical Director and other clinical record products.

Pro Medicus intends to leverage the relationship it has with the 14,500 general practitioners on its promedicus.net e-health network to quickly build market share for it’s new product named Promed Clinical. Approximately 16,000 GP's are reported to be using Medical Director as their script writing and patient management software. A key feature of Promed Clinical is that GP's using Medical Director can seamlessly transition to the product.

The doctors at Surrey Hills Medical Centre, a busy twelve-doctor practice in inner Melbourne have been using Promed Clinical for over 9 months. "What prompted us to look at an alternative to Medical Director was that we were faced with a significant cost to upgrade our computer hardware to maintain system performance. Switching to Promed Clinical not only allowed us to keep our existing hardware, but also gave us a system that was dramatically faster than what we had been used to. All of our existing data was converted ready to use from day one with virtually no extra training required. Promed Clinical has been extremely reliable and we could not be happier with the result," they said.

Pro Medicus has been searching for some time to find the right product to take to the GP desk-top market. Managing director Dr Sam Hupert, a former GP himself said, "Doctors won't change products if they think there is the potential to even briefly disrupt their practices. Knowing this, we went looking for technology that could deliver similar or better functionality than the system they were currently using, had full data conversion capability and importantly, didn't require expenditure on new hardware. "

"We also wanted a product that we could easily integrate into our existing programming and support infrastructure. Promed Clinical is a perfect technical fit as it uses the same scalable and robust database technology that we use for many of our own products."

Pro Medicus has acquired this technology from its developer Richard King. Mr King, who has 25 years software development experience, will join the Pro Medicus development team and will lead the ongoing development of Promed Clinical. "I've brought the technology to this stage, but it now needs the expertise, customer base and support infrastructure of a bigger company to fully exploit the market potential. Pro Medicus is the ideal fit with 20 years experience in the medical IT field and having most GPs already linked to their e-health network," Mr King said.

Promed Clinical is available from Pro Medicus immediately and will be showcased to approximately 1,500 doctors attending the GPCE Conference in Sydney in May which is the largest conference for Australian GP's organised by GP's.

"This deal goes a long way to delivering our strategic goal of leveraging additional value from promedicus.net," said Dr Hupert. "We are currently the largest e-health provider in terms of delivery of radiology results to GP's. With the release of Report Sender we have expanded this to include letters from specialists. Promed Clinical, with its presence on the GP desktop, will open up a whole new range of possible e-health transactions for us."

The total current market for clinical desktop software is estimated to be in excess of $16 million per annum divided equally between recurring subscriptions and other indirect revenue streams such as advertising and corporate sponsorship. Pro Medicus is a key player in the e-health market which is growing rapidly fuelled by Government backed initiatives such as HealthConnect.

For more information:

Dr Sam Hupert Managing Director Pro Medicus Limited	Mike Feehan Monsoon Communications Phone: + 61 3 9620 3333
Email: hupert@promedicus.com.au Phone: +61 3 9429 8800 Facsimile: +61 3 9429 9544