Leading Healthcare Organisations Across EMEA Select Oracle for Greater Choice and Support

Within the healthcare sector specifically, regulatory requirements are increasingly strict, cost pressures mount and patient expectations continue to grow. Healthcare organisations in EMEA are today using Oracle solutions to make faster, better and safer clinical decisions, via a single integrated view of patient information that minimises the likelihood of medical error. With the advent of fixed tariff re-imbursement, collaborative supply chains, the need to attract and retain the best staff and achieve skills and training compliance, these organisations are also using Oracle applications to support 21st century non-clinical business processes. At the same time they can reduce costs involved in these processes and redirect those savings to patient care. Oracle's family of products which include core healthcare applications, Oracle® E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Siebel applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database 10g, enables healthcare organisations to adopt best practice processes, get better information and realize better results.

"Across EMEA, Healthcare IT has been a cottage industry for far too long and many healthcare and related organizations realize they cannot respond to the new pressures by doing things 'the old way'," said Charles Scatchard, Vice President, Healthcare, Oracle EMEA. "The sad fact is that paper medical records do not deliver 21st Century patient care and healthcare organisations need to have the right IT platform in place to integrate business and clinical information for improved decision making, better patient care and to support the non-clinical processes. In fact we see many organizations using Oracle solutions to take the first steps down the road of achieving integrated healthcare solutions by making savings in the non-clinical processes first to then allow them to invest in the clinical IT applications later, safe in the knowledge they have invested in the best IT Platform."

Oracle is also making significant inroads into the life sciences industries. Organizations spanning the industry - including biotechnology firms, contract research organizations, as well as pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers - are choosing applications, infrastructure software and services from Oracle to help them accelerate and optimize new product development cycle time, enhance operational efficiency, improve sales and marketing effectiveness, streamline regulatory compliance and reduce risk.

Today, all of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and the top 10 medical device companies run Oracle® Applications. Similarly, 28 of the top 30 pharmaceutical companies run Oracle infrastructure software and 18 of the top 20 medical device companies run Oracle infrastructure software.

ACTION, Sweden
The ACTION project in Sweden, standing for Assisting Carers using Telematics Interventions to meet Older persons' Needs, is an innovative 'tele-care' system helping older people to live at home with their carers through the later stages of their lives. Based at University College of Borås, Sweden, it provides several key features including home computer and videophone that give access to high quality pages of advice, and access to nurses in a dedicated contact centre; an Oracle database to hold many thousands of multimedia information pages easily updateable by non-technical people; and a platform to provide easy to understand, culturally specific information. By providing clear, accessible information on say caring for people during stages of dementia, and with phone access to nurses - which helps combat feelings of isolation - older people are being helped to stay at home for much longer, and carers potentially save the cost of nursing home provision. "Today we have more than 6,000 pages of information stored in the database, plus various video clips, all available via a simple web interface," said Lennart Magnusson, ACTION project manager at the University College of Borås. "We chose Oracle because we needed a database that is quick, reliable and flexible - it needed to be easily updateable and able to cope with an enormous growth in information. Security is also an important issue - we expect people to add their own personal web pages so they can present themselves to others in the online community."

Companies in the healthcare and related industries such as life sciences and pharmaceuticals who selected Oracle in the six months to end August 2006 include:
Coloplast A/S (Denmark), EVA (Egypt), Pierre Fabre (France); Regional Health Authorities of Eastern Macedonia & Thrace (Greece), Peifasyn (Greece); Regione Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy), Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano- Ripartizione Sanita (Italy), Baxter Healthcare Europe (Netherlands), Rijnmondnet (Netherlands); Ministry of Health (Saudi Arabia); King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital (Saudi Arabia); Clinical Trial Services (UK).

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