Heron Technology Corp. PAS in Jamaican Hospitals

September 20, 1999, Markham, Ontario, CANADA: Heron Technology Corp. (HTC) of Markham announced today that it has received a contract, valued in excess of $1 Million [Cdn], from the Ministry of Health of the Government of Jamaica. The contract relates to the provision of application software modules, training and implementation services to computerize the Patient Administration System [PAS] in eighteen [18] hospitals in that country.

The Canadian Government, through Canadian Commercial Corporation [CCC] a $1 billion annual business reporting to the Parliament of Canada, has entered into a contact with the Government of Jamaica on behalf of HTC, to provide these additional products and services during the next two to three years, during which time standardized IT systems will be implemented in all of the Government hospitals in Jamaica.

The contract, signed by the Minister of Health, the Honourable John Junor, and by the Permanent Secretary of Health, George Briggs, is an add-on to the original HTC contact for the computerization of five [5] hospitals signed in March of 1997. The first 5 hospitals became fully operational with their computerized systems in February of 1998. The total of twenty-three [23] hospitals, representing over 4,600 hospital beds, covers all Government and Specialist hospitals in this country with a population of 2.5 million.

The HTC PAS application software modules address the functional processing needs in such departments as Admitting, Inpatients, Outpatients, Accident & Emergency, Billing and Accounts Receivable, Health Records Abstracting, and MOH Statistical Reporting. The IT (Information Technology) systems will be the same in all hospitals, providing significant cost benefits in such areas as initial and on-going training, employee transfers and hiring, data information exchange and MOH data collection, because of the standardized procedures and coding at all facilities.

Industry information indicates that Jamaica is the first, and only jurisdiction in the world to implement a standardized on-site PAS in all country hospitals.

According to Peter Wright, Senior IT adviser at the Jamaican MOH: " The performance of the HTC PAS is second to none. It has functioned with very limited downtime [only 72 hours] since its implementation more than one and a half years ago in the 5 Government hospitals. Since collectively there are more than 100 users, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, this equates to less than one-hundredth of one percent [0.005%] downtime for any user during the past year and a half, during the equivalent of over 1.32 million-user hours of end-user operation". Mr. Wright adds, "This is attributable to HTC’s solid application program code, and to the very stable SCO UNIX operating system."

Contributing to the Government’s decision to extend the HTC PAS to the additional 18 hospitals, is the very low TCO [Total Cost of Ownership] exhibited by the HTC systems.

The PAS desktop devices can be very low-cost thin clients, or CRT devices, instead of having to be PC’s [Personal Computers/fat-clients] which are mandated by many competitive systems. This non-PC approach [thin-client] can reduce the on-going technical support and maintenance costs by as much as 80%, as reported by such noted industry experts as IDC [International Data Corp.].

No on-site hospital technical support personnel will be required, which would be prohibitively expensive were 23 hospitals expected to support such an expense at each site. HTC supports all sites remotely, at the equivalent cost of 2 FTE’s [Full Time Equivalents] for all 23 hospitals.

The Mayor of Markham, Don Cousens, met with an HTC-sponsored visiting Jamaican Health Industry delegation in late 1997 at the Mayor’s offices. Mr. Cousens commented this week that "such high-tech export activity as developed by HTC is fundamental to our Canadian economy, and contributes to the growth of jobs in Markham, Canada’s leading high-technology business centre. The Town of Markham wishes HTC the best of success as it pursues IT contracts around the globe within the health care IT business sector."

Additional information is available at HTC’s website: www.herontech.com, or by calling (905) 475-8050.