This popped up last week:
Telstra buys UK firm Dr Foster
- The Australian
- March 27, 2015
Mitchell Bingemann
Telstra notched up its 15th investment for its growing Health division after the telco acquired British-based health analytics business Dr Foster in the latest step towards turning its stand-alone health unit into a billion-dollar-a-year business.
The company paid about $15 million to acquire the Dr Foster business, which works with public and private healthcare organisations to improve internal care processes by measuring variations in hospital errors.
“It can be used to identify areas where patient mortality or patient length of stay or patient readmission is more than it should be given the complexity of the individual patient,” Telstra Health managing director Shane Solomon told The Australian.
“It identifies areas of strength and weakness adjusting for the risk of the patients. Hospitals use this to look at areas where they are doing better than average … and conversely they can identify where they are doing badly and identify which areas they need to pay attention to.”
In Britain, where Dr Foster was established in 1999 by two journalists, the service is also used as a tool of accountability to publish information on the quality of UK National Health Service hospitals.
But Dr Solomon said there were no such plans to use the tool in a similar way in Australia. “In Australia, so far, our customers have preferred to use it as a quality improvement tool within hospitals rather than a public tool,” he said.
“If you have a blame culture people go to ground, they won’t own up to things. The real public good here is that people who survive in hospitals are those that should survive.”
Under the acquisition, Telstra will pick up 100 staff and two offices, one in London and an analytics unit in the Imperial College London, which is a highly respected medical research institute in Britain.
More here:
There is also coverage here:
Telstra just bought a health analytics company in a deal reportedly worth up to $50 million
Mar 27, 2015, 9:17 AM
Telstra has acquired a health analytics company in a deal reportedly worth $40-50 million as it builds out its health tech division.
UK-based Dr Foster was snapped up by Telstra Health after it previously secured distribution rights to the company’s software, which is used by healthcare providers to rank and compare performance of hospitals and staff.
Telstra has not disclosed the terms of the deal but the AFR reported industry sources indicated the telco had paid between $40 million and $50 million for the company.
Part-owned by the UK Department of Health, Telstra Health will continue to build out the Dr Foster business in Australia and the UK, as well as pursue international opportunities. The company already has contracts in place at 15 hospital services in Australia.
In October 2014, Telstra launched its new healthcare unit. It expects health spending to grow to $200 billion by 2020 and sees Australia struggling to provide reliable services in the face of an ageing population and a rising instance of chronic diseases.
More here:
This story (from their website) explains what Dr Foster is and does:
Our story
Operating in England, continental Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia we work with a wide range of organisations and clients, including healthcare providers and commissioners/payors, clinicians and managers. Our products, people and services provide actionable insights and inform decision-making by leadership teams.
Health systems in most countries today face significant challenges, of which one of the greatest is to “do more with less”. They need better information to identify the changes that are required to ensure that they are sustainable, and to really engage doctors and managers on the change journey. Understanding variation is one key aspect of this; reducing unwarranted variation by improving performance will deliver better care for patients and save money.
We work across health economies to monitor and benchmark performance – nationally and globally – against key indicators of quality and efficiency, drawing on multiple datasets (including administrative data and hospital theatre data) in innovative and pioneering ways. We work closely with the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College London and all our metrics, methodologies and models are published in full. We adhere to a Code of Conduct that prohibits political bias and requires us to act in the public interest. The code is monitored by the Dr Foster Ethics Committee.
There is more here:
The case studies make interesting reading:
It will be very interesting to see how the company prospers (or not) under its new owners.
Late Update - Today 1/4/2015 we have been told another one has gone - they have bought the telemedicine company Anywhere Healthcare!
Late Update - Today 1/4/2015 we have been told another one has gone - they have bought the telemedicine company Anywhere Healthcare!
David.
One story says $15M the other $50M - big difference. If it's $50M then either something unbelievably fantastic has been developed under the radar OR Telstra's Health Team have been conned very very big time.
ReplyDeleteDo they know WHAT they are building, what they NEED to build it and what each company/product contributes to that system (DOES) ???
ReplyDeleteIt's like buying computer parts from many different companies and trying to fit them together .. you may end up with duplication, incompatibilities and missing parts eg. 2x CPU's, but both are incompatible with the mainboard you already bought and you still can't boot the system.
~~~~ Tim
No they don't have any idea. They are just following their leader who learnt how to make everything work together when in Hong Kong. How often have we heard when at the HK Health Department there were a whole lot of disparate systems working together as an integrated whole - Ipso Facto - if they can do it in HK we can do it at Telstra.
ReplyDelete