The UK iSeries market may soon be boosted significantly if an American company that specialises in software for the health care market get its way.

Michigan-based BlueWare has had considerable success with its iSeries-only solutions in the US and has recently won a bid to implement its electronic health record system at a hospital trust in the south of England. Such is the sensitivity surrounding the government’s £6.2 billion pound National Programme for IT in the NHS that the trust in question does not want to be named.

Nevertheless, the installation of a brand new model 520 bodes well for the fortunes of the platform in this sector, especially when one considers that the iSeries has rarely been the server of choice for NHS IT procurers who have tended to go down the Unix route in the past. What’s more, the win for BlueWare was purely application-led which makes it the kind of sale that is reminiscent of the heady days of AS/400 hegemony in the nineties.

“They loved the application so much that they didn’t care what it ran on,” says Biff Myre, global sales director of BlueWare. “They didn’t have the skills to run it so we are doing a remote managed service for them.” The hardware was supplied direct from IBM, although BlueWare is currently in the process of talking to iSeries-based Business Partners in the UK to take advantage of this market opportunity.

Business Partner reaction should be very strong indeed. In England alone there are 302 Primary Care Trusts and 290 NHS Hospital Trusts. BlueWare’s UK sales executive, Sarah Greenwood originally worked for IBM’s health care division in the UK when she spotted the opportunity.

“I was a client rep in IBM working with health care customers and basically I just saw that there was a really pressing need for document management within the acute health care environment,” she says. “I did a search, a worldwide search, for an appropriate application running on IBM technology and found BlueWare. BlueWare and IBM teamed together and we’ve got a very nice pipeline of opportunity now. It really is a best-of-breed application so it sells itself but the need was in the market place and there really wasn’t anything else to fill that space.”

George Beckett, chief technology officer of BlueWare. explains some of the factors that are driving such implementations: “First of all it’s a technology that’s time has come. It wasn’t as refined as it has been in the last five years. Also, the pricing has gone down so the price/performance on the technology has got better and better. But I also think that one of the things that they have realised as they are going through the NHS programme is that they are going to have a lot of data out there now.

“They have barns and barns of paper records. And really the information, all of the historical information, is still on paper and they will continue to generate paper even with the new national programme. There will be a very large paper record and yet they will say: ‘Well, we only have half the record online with the national programme. How do we get the other half on?’ And certainly all of the old stuff, the historical stuff, is all paper. And what I think what is driving them is that they say ‘Well, if we are going to have an all digital medical record, we need it all online, we don’t need it half online and half in a paper folder’.”

Greenwood adds that handling paper records in dedicated records departments in hospitals is expensive and that at a time when NHS trusts are making headlines with soaring budget deficits, the trusts are looking at ways to cut costs and improve efficiency. Given the sensitivity around patient record privacy, the iSeries’ much-vaunted security attributes can only help her company’s cause. The beauty of BlueWare’s solutions are that they will overlay any existing technological infrastructure and allow health trusts to share records easily. Indeed, with a BlueWare solution installed on an iSeries, a hospital could even become a service provider for other trusts in its region.

If more NHS trusts purchase BlueWare solutions there is a lot of potential for the iSeries ecosphere in the UK as a whole. For instance, given that online medical records have to be constantly available, each trust will also need a high availability solution and the extra hardware to run it on. Beckett says that he has also had talks with firms selling complementary solutions such as archiving.

“I think that there the potential for a lot of other vendors to be able to add on their utility programmes and what have you to what’s there already,” he says.