A leading Israeli HMO specializing in healthcare value and quality systems announced Feb. 20 that it has been selected to help build a new national healthcare information technology infrastructure for Bulgaria, expected to serve eight million people when fully implemented.
Maccabi Healthcare Services won the opportunity to be a key player in a consortium to build the €3.5 million Bulgarian healthcare system over such well-known global IT firms as HP, IBM and Oracle, said Wendy Simmons, Maccabi spokesperson. The World Bank will fund the project, she said.
"We are a healthcare supplier, not a technology company, which gives us profound insight into the needs of HMOs," said Ofer Carmel, CEO of Maccabi Group Holdings.
Maccabi's product -the Health Value Added (HVA) Patient Care Knowledge Base- allows HMOs to access patient records in real-time, measure quality of care, improve budgets and monitor member satisfaction by recording, analyzing and making accessible all patient medical data, including all patient-HMO interactions, said Simmons. Currently, Maccabi manages some 30 million patient-HMO transactions per year for its 1.7 million members, she said.
"The system we created is the healthcare delivery backbone for almost two million people in Israel, whose healthcare expenditure, according to the World Health Organization, is only two-thirds as much per capita as countries like Sweden and France, and one-third that of the United States," said Carmel.
Yet Israel has comparable, and in many cases better, life expectancy and child/adult mortality rates, and lower expenditure as a percent of gross domestic product - only 60 percent that of the United States, Carmel said. "These figures are a direct reflection of efficient healthcare system management. We want to work with HMOs around the world who can appreciate our direct interest in better patient care and more efficient system management," said Carmel.
According to Simmons, Maccabi is Israel's fastest growing HMO, with 9,000 employees providing comprehensive medical coverage to about a quarter of Israel's population. It operates 5,300 clinics throughout Israel, utilizing the services of 3,600 physicians, including some 450 senior consulting physicians heading departments at the country's private and public hospitals. Maccabi's 44 pharmacies and 600 private pharmacies throughout the country dispense prescriptions received by satellite link.