Abbott expands medical IT horizons

Dave Champagne
Dave Champagne

Abbott Informatics Solutions VP Dave Champagne praises Israel acquisition Starlims for pioneering medical IT in the cloud.

Israeli company Starlims, run by brothers Itschak and Chaim Friedman, was ahead of its time. The company was a success in medical IT, years before biomed became a recognized sector on the local capital market. In 2009, Starlims was sold to pharmaceuticals and medical devices giant Abbott Laboratories for $123 million, and was delisted.

Starlims continues to operate in Israel, and employs 35 people here. The company's system is designed to manage computing systems in research laboratories. This market turns over $700 million annually, and is growing at a single-digit rate, but Abbott is eyeing the clinical laboratory management market, the laboratories that serve hospitals and health funds and have the task of analyzing patient samples in real time. This is a billion dollar market.

Abbott Informatics Solutions divisional VP Dave Champagne says that Abbott's diagnostics technology is now installed in laboratories but these are laboratories that do not analyze patients' samples in real time such as research laboratories at universities, pharmaceutical companies, R&D services, clinical trial companies etc. Abbott hopes to capture the new clinical medical market through the Israeli systems developed at Starlims.

He said, "This will give us an advantage against other companies that manufacture medical equipment for diagnostics such as Siemens and Roche."

These companies produce equipment for examining imaging or laboratory tests but they do not have computerized systems for managing the tests. He said, "These companies' systems need to undergo integration into computer systems that they do not manufacture whereas in our company the equipment and the computers will correspond naturally. Every layer of integration between equipment that is not adapted reduces the convenience for the user and the precision. Our consumers want the diagnosis and the information management as one unit."

Champagne recently came to Israel to sign a contract with the Maccabi Health Fund. The system will be installed in Maccabi's main laboratory and the Assuta Medical Centers network. He said, "We're talking about a million samples annually and meanwhile the system is suitable for 650 users (laboratories) and can handle samples in the field of hematology, genetics, biology, molecules, tissue classification and more."

He continued, "What was great in Starlims' original systems was that it was one of the first to operate in a cloud. Starlims team successfully understood that it was necessary and in actual fact designed their system completely from scratch when clouds started to come in. Since the acquisition, we have added a mobile interface and appropriate security. In contrast to laboratory research results that are created and remain in the laboratory, a range of people want to see clinical results from remote control - doctors, patients and insurance companies. The main laboratory can also remotely see the mix and pace of results."

Champagne points out that in the area of laboratory management, Starlims is competing with companies like Thermo Fisher Scientific, LabWare and LVS, while in clinical laboratories the rivals are completely different companies - Cerner, Meditech, and Sunquest Information Systems.

He said, "In research systems, whether you are developing pharmaceuticals, analyzing food samples or if you are a forensic laboratory, the sample is king and that is what dictates the process. In the clinical laboratory, the sample is strongly connected to information from the patient, and neither of them is independent of each other. There is much more connection to medical records, support systems and clinical trials, and the results are for the most part not a report but recommendations for treatment." In addition, in the research laboratory sector, there is much less regulation on use of data that in the clinical field. Abbott, as a medical equipment company, has always worked with regulations and this gives us an advantage."

 

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 2, 2015

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2015

Dave Champagne
Dave Champagne
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