19 December 2023
Orion Health was founded in 1993 by Ian McCrae and is NZ’s third largest healthtech company. They have operations in 17 countries and are focused on the digital revolution in healthcare.
What has been Orion’s greatest success of 2023? What has been your biggest learning this year?
Orion Health had a year of milestones in 2023, such as the launch of our health intelligence platform Orchestral. Saudi Arabia’s country-wide Health Information Exchange went live, covering 30 million people. Our greatest success is seeing the improvements we’ve made for clinicians and patients globally.
Our biggest lesson this year was in the UK, where we transformed our business by putting customers first, bringing on a new leadership team and taking an open collaboration approach with the NHS and other vendors to provide better health outcomes in the region.
North America is the fastest-growing market for the TIN200 – is that true for you too? What’s your strategy for the USA? And conversely – what’s your strategy for expanding beyond the USA to other healthcare markets?
North America has long been one of our largest markets, and we’re still seeing growth in the region. Our presence in Canada has grown significantly this year, in part thanks to our Digital Front Door in Ontario, which is transforming how the 15 million people who live in the province interact with healthcare.
In the US we recently launched ‘HIE Center of Excellence’ which showcases healthtech innovators and moves the focus to extract real value from data Health Information Exchanges and other tools. With over 20 years’ experience bringing data together in the HIE, we are now working to unlock data to enable better decision making.
AI has broken through to become a hot topic in the media recently, but I understand you’ve been investing into machine learning and AI for a long time. Can you give us a sense of its current application in your products? And what do you think the future of AI is in healthtech?
We believe AI will be truly transformative in healthcare, but for this to happen it needs the ability to access the right information, at speed, via centralised platforms. This is where much of our effort is focused – on helping our clients first unify their data to unlock its true potential.
This year we partnered with Pieces Technologies to enable AI-generated patient summaries and clinical insights directly in the Orion Health Clinical Portal dashboards. The summaries are based on all available patient data in Orchestral, meaning AI can access the right information at the speed it needs to be transformational.
Orion describes itself as a “community of start-ups”, which allows for autonomy, agility and flexibility. How does that work in practice?
Orion Health is evolving to focus on unlocking the real value of the mountains of data in healthcare. We ensure our agile start-up mentality is front of mind for our entire business. We have more than 600 staff at Orion Health, and of that half work in R&D and product innovation, sticking to our start-up roots.
Our recent focus has been on developing and streamlining our solution suite: the Orion Health Unified Healthcare Platform which combines our three solutions, Orchestral, Amadeus and Virtuoso to provide the best outcomes for clinicians and patients. We will always maintain a start up attitude but we have narrowed our focus on the solutions that can reimagine the healthcare experience across all our markets.