Thanks for your great work and analysis @Seasoning.

I’m not sure Epic are in the UK, but they are in Australia and America. Epic are a private company that produces an excellent Electronic Medical Record (EMR). There are useful communication features like messaging between treatment teams, through computer and smartphone app, with patient info attached and being able to see the name and contact number of the nurse taking care of a patient. Many things that anybody outside of medicine would just expect our systems can do.

My understanding is some of Alcidion’s software has a fair bit of this capability, but I need to check more. The positive for Alcidion is that it brings a lot of this functionality with their non-EMR offerings. Hospitals using Cerner or other EMR’s can get the functionality of those communications etc without (inconveniently) transitioning to the more expensive Epic.

Cogstate says their greatest competitor is a person sitting across from the patient with a pen and paper test. In many hospitals, especially more rural ones, Alcidion’s competitor is nurses and doctors sitting on Microsoft word or excel. Junior doctors across the world without these systems come in 30 minutes early to update the list with where all their patients physically are in the hospital. Even pre-Covid all you needed was somebody to order a few flu swabs one afternoon to make it musical fucking beds and the whole list needed to be reordered. Once I was in an under-resources backwater hospital we missed a patient for three days!

I have some time off after 7 night shifts in a row and one of my plans for it is to somehow get a demo of Alcidion’s products. If IR can help me I’ll get back to fellow straw people with the experience and if they are helpful.