LINUX O/S in Jamaican Hospitals for PAS

The Canadian Government, through Canadian Commercial Corporation [CCC] a $1 billion annual business reporting to the Parliament of Canada, has entered into this contract 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 contract for the computerization of five hospitals, valued at $420,000, signed in March of 1997. The first 5 hospitals became fully operational with their computerized systems in February of 1998. The total of 23 hospitals, representing over 4,600 hospital beds, covers all Government and Specialist hospitals in Jamaica, and covers 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.

No on-site hospital technical support personnel are required for the HTC PAS, which would be prohibitively expensive were 23 hospitals expected to support such a technical cost at each site. HTC supports all sites remotely, at minimal cost.

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 two years ago. Collectively, there are more than 100 users, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in the five institutions.

Accordingly, the up time experience equates to an impressive 99.995% during the past two years, the equivalent of over 1.5 million hours of end-user operation".

Mr. Wright adds, "This is attributable to HTC’s solid application program code, and to the very stable 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 introduction of the Linux operating system, version 6.0 from Red Hat Software, further contributes to the Government’s objective of keeping costs in line, since Linux is free. An individual hospital could easily have over 100 desktop devices in operation, and accordingly the savings will be considerable. The Linux O/S is now rapidly becoming the O/S of choice around the world, and according to IDC [International Data Corp.], Framingham, Mass., the use of the Linux O/S will exceed that of the Microsoft NT O/S by the year 2003.

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 software vendors. 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, and the Gartner Group Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based research firm.

Additional information is available at HTC’s website: www.herontech.com, by telephone: (905) 475-8050, or by fax: (905) 475-5842.