The company, which already has established offices in Hong Kong, Malaysia and India, has been awarded contracts which will see its Health CloudMed Arcus Hospital Information System deployed by hospitals in Malaysia and Thailand.  The integrated patient care system that provides an end-to-end single medical record system for hospital networks spread over multiple locations is currently in use in more than 250 hospitals across Asia.

Under the new contracts, implementation of Arcus has commenced at Sunway Medical Centre group, Penang Adventist Hospital group and Tung Shin Hospital’s in Malaysia and Khon Kaen University Hospital in Thailand.

Gordon Ballantyne, Group Executive of Telstra Retail, said finding more efficient and effective ways to deliver healthcare would be increasingly important across Asia, with healthcare costs in the region expected increase to from US$1.34 trillion in 2013 to US$2.21 trillion by 2018, due to growing populations and chronic illnesses becoming more common.

“While Australia remains our primary focus, the expansion into Asia marks an important milestone in the continued development of Telstra Health as we become a global business.

“Many of the health system pain points in Australia – such as the need to digitalise and automate complex processes and share information in real time – are the same for healthcare sectors around the world. It makes sense to capitalise on these global opportunities, especially when businesses we have acquired have a global footprint.

“Our Arcus product is designed to make it easier for doctors, nurses and pharmacists to treat patients, reducing the amount of time spent on paperwork and freeing up time to spend on what they do best - caring for patients.

“The system is highly flexible and can support multiple languages including English, Thai and Mandarin across multiple sites while it will also be able to record both western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine data in the future.”

Sunway Group Healthcare Services’ managing director, Lau Beng Long said “Arcus will be the first to introduce the use of tablet PCs to doctors, pharmacists and nurses to enable optimal mobility and flexibility when treating patients in both inpatient and outpatient environments. It will also be an integral tool for the consolidation of medical consultation notes and prescriptions at the end of a patient’s visit”.

Telstra Health previously acquired UK based health analytics firm Dr Foster in March, currently with customers in 10 countries including the UK, the US, Italy and Spain.