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IDIOM News
Monday, 5 April, 2004
A match made in Healix
The medical body responsible for approving kidney transplants says software developed by Auckland health IT company Healix should make the task of matching donated kidneys with patients faster and more "transparent".
Healix developed the kidney-matching application at cost for the National Kidney Allocation System (Nkas) and now hopes to sell it to other transplant organisations overseas.
It automatically draws up a "top 40" list of potential recipients for each kidney, basing its calculations on dozens of variables, including the blood type and antibodies present in donated kidneys, and on Nkas' own allocation rules.
The system stores information on the 350-400 New Zealanders who are waiting for a kidney donation at any one time and interfaces directly with the Blood Service's computer system, HistoTrac.
The list of optimal recipients is then telephoned through, till clinicians find a patient able to undergo an operation at short notice.
Kidney transplants must be completed within 24 hours of a donor organ becoming available. The final decision on transplants is made by medical director Ian Dittmer.
Healix director Matt Hector-Taylor says the perception held by some members of the public that high-profile individuals such as Jonah Lomu are able to jump the queue on kidney transplants is incorrect.
About 50 kidney transplants are performed in New Zealand each year. Recipients will all be selected by the system, except in the relatively few cases where patients on the waiting list find their own suitable live donor.
Nkas previously used Australian matching software which didn't interface directly with HistoTrac, so that the results of tests on donor organs had to be input manually.
Changes to the rules governing eligibility and to the list of transplant patients had to be made by a systems developer in Australia.
Dr Dittmer, who promoted Healix's software at a conference in Amsterdam last week, says the rules embodied in the application are public.
"With the new system, we will be able to give anyone on the waiting list a full explanation as to how and why each recipient has been selected.
"While the old system was workable, it had become inflexible and cumbersome. Now we can maintain our databases and manage the implementation of our rules and policies ourselves when they change."
Nkas recently altered its policies to give children under 15 greater priority in allocation decisions, for example.
Mr Hector-Taylor says Healix developed the software for Nkas as a "proof of concept". He expects the software might retail commercially to overseas health bodies for between $25,000 and $40,000.
The company owns the intellectual property and Dr Dittmer's promotion of the software is part of the deal under which Nkas got it at cost price, he says.
The software has been designed to be capable of handling organs other than kidneys and could be integrated with "supply chain" software for managing the logistics of storing organs and getting them safely to donors, he says.
A New Zealand-developed rules engine called Idiom lies at the heart of the system. It has been integrated with Microsoft .Net software.
"We took `out of the box' Microsoft software, linked it with the rules engine and we think we've been able to reduce development time by a high percentage," says Mr Hector-Taylor.
Healix is a joint venture created last year by Auckland health IT specialist Healthmap and IT services firm RHE Holdings.
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