InterSystems’ Healthcare Heritage Powers Multisector Data Expansion

TechMarketView recently sat down with InterSystems’ UK&I Country Manager, Colin Henderson— now 10 months in post — to discuss both the company’s momentum in the UK health market, but also its plans for wider deployment of the underpinning InterSystems IRIS data platform in other sectors.

Henderson outlined the main solution areas for the company going into 2025. The first two focus on InterSystems’ health sector interests: TrakCare and HealthShare—between them, making up two-thirds of its business in the UK.

TrakCare (the larger of the two) is an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system, used extensively in Scotland (all bar two of the nation’s health boards are customers), in England and Wales, where the TrakCare Laboratory Information Management System is being deployed as a national solution (TrakCare isn’t currently deployed in Northern Ireland). It’s sold in 28 countries worldwide in addition to the UK; but not the US—though InterSystems’ IRIS data platform technology is used by Epic Systems to power its own EPR solution, which is market-leading in North America and currently holds the #2 spot in TechMarketView’s ranking of Health Software and IT Services (SITS) suppliers in the UK (see UK Health Suppliers, Trends & Forecasts 2024).

HealthShare is a unified healthcare record solution, which is designed to combat fragmentation in information sharing. The platform can extend access to healthcare data beyond hospital deployments and into the community—for example, sharing joined-up care plans across multiple teams in multiple settings, with opportunities for citizen access too. InterSystems is working on an AI copilot for HealthShare which is on the company’s roadmap for 2025, deploying a multi-model approach to LLMs in order to improve accuracy.

The remaining third of the business comprises InterSystems IRIS data platform, in use across multiple segments including Financial Services, Defence, Supply Chain / Logistics, and Publishing as well as healthcare.

InterSystems is privately-held and doesn’t release detailed revenue figures, however it’s revealed that worldwide revenue was in excess of $1bn in 2023, with double-digit growth in the first half of 2024.

Specific projects in Health include deploying the Health Connect Cloud interoperability platform in additional regions (with more customers moving to InterSystems hosted services); transforming diagnostics services in Wales (prioritised as effective care pathways are an important component of managing waiting lists); and an additional laboratory information management system upgrade in the East of England.

A big focus for InterSystems this year and next is fast-tracking customers to activate more functionality from their existing implemented systems such as opening up diagnostics capabilities, and extending acute deployments out into the community. Henderson referred to TrakCare as being a particularly under-exploited solution; the company is also adding new data feeds to HealthShare in order to expand its applicability and reach.

Henderson welcomed references in the 2024 Autumn Budget to extending care into community settings to provide a more holistic service (informed by the recommendations of the Darzi Report—see A major tilt towards technology in the NHS), and InterSystems—along with other Health SITS suppliers—is now waiting to see how funding is allocated on the ground as good practice in this area isn’t yet evenly distributed across the country.

Although Henderson believes that the concept of “upstream healthcare” is still a little ahead of the curve in the UK, he is seeing a move to shift the balance of care towards the citizen taking more responsibility—which goes hand-in-hand with giving patients more access to their data (in order to be able to make more informed decisions and get more involved in preventative measures).

He also reports that, in order to manage the extension of care across multiple settings, organisations are looking to standardise patient information and consolidate around a single platform. They’re interested in one platform that can create a unified view of the patient that takes in information from multiple sources (say, to provide insights on specific disease risks—to stem the flow of people into hospital, or holistic treatment plans that require coordination across providers).

In the context of providing treatment planning insights at scale, whilst the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) is being delivered by a group led by Palantir, InterSystems nevertheless does see that there might be opportunities for the company around the programme. According to Henderson, some 98% of Integrated Care Systems use InterSystems to move data around, so the company sees itself as a natural enabler of the FDP.

Henderson’s view is that the NHS still has some way to go to deal with the technical debt in its infrastructure before it can take full advantage of new technology advances, such as AI. There are pockets of readiness and good practice, but these are not evenly distributed across the health landscape.

Nevertheless (and in expectation that infrastructural necessities will catch up), InterSystems is looking at where and how best to deploy AI across its offerings. In Health within the UK, the company is engaged in pilot projects in administrative areas that concentrate on areas such as waiting list management or highlighting risk of no show patients, using AI to speed up processes that aren’t directly delving into sensitive data (or affecting front-line clinical care decision-making). For instance, a project at the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia uses tabular machine learning techniques to reduce the impact of patients missing appointments. It integrates a no-show risk score into admin user interface of the appointment information system which enable operators to prioritise only manually phoning (and reminding) the most likely no-shows on the upcoming patient roster, reducing daily calls from 500 to 150, and shrinking the no-show rate by 40%.

InterSystems IRIS data platform accounts for around a third of InterSystems’ business in the UK with Financial Services and Supply Chain being two main areas of focus for InterSystems.

The platform combines a common data fabric with natural language interrogation, and provides the foundation for data and analytics applications across a variety of sectors (not just Health). It’s looking to Systems Integrator (SI) partners to cover the ground with them, and apply their domain expertise and geo-territory knowledge, while InterSystems supplies the innovative solutions; especially in accounts which have legacy solutions and where there’s a need to drive value from existing data.

The data platform technology roadmap into 2025 includes extending data fabric capability, aiming to leverage developer and SI ecosystems to reach application composers, and offer tailored vertical solutions, not just providing the building blocks at arm’s length.

There are sustainability opportunities on the horizon too, such as leveraging IRIS’ capabilities on” intelligent decisioning” to provide a “sustainability advisor for compliance and insights” in Supply Chain use cases. Analytics was recently placed joint 1^st amongst technologies deployed in Supply Chain Optimisation use cases in TechMarketView’s Sustainability Technology Activity Index, with the use case area itself accounting for 11% of logged activities—see Sustainability Technology Activity Index Q1 2024 - Global Tech User / Use Case Insights—so it’s a potentially rich seam to mine. However, these are 12+ months out at the moment… and, of course, a lot depends on the customer priorities communicated back to base from new SI partners as InterSystems looks to work with more of the experts in various sector fields.