CHICAGO – If you can make it in New Zealand, you can make it anywhere?

That axiom might not work for show business, but executives at Orion Health say it works just fine for healthcare. The seven-year-old Auckland-based company, with a North American headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., has handled most of the health information exchange architecture in its home country and has a foothold in Australia, Europe and Canada as well. Now it’s rolling out new products in hopes of grabbing a bigger share of the U.S. market.

“It’s what we do – it’s what we’ve always done,” said James Date, the company’s sales director, during the HIMSS09 conference last month in Chicago. “These types of solutions are nothing new to Orion.”

Building on the company’s Rhapsody Integration Engine and Concerto Physician Portal, Orion Health has launched Concerto Clinical Documentation and Concerto Whiteboard, the latter a real-time patient tracking system designed to provide physicians with a quick and easy view of patient information. The two new products are designed to improve the collection of flow of patient information in a portal shared by healthcare providers across a wide geographical area – like a RHIO or HIE.

Date says healthcare providers “want one throat to choke” – or one entity to take the responsibility of making sure the portal works, rather than a collection of vendors or layers of accountability. And with a string of successes in New Zealand and Canada, he said, Orion has the pedigree.

“Vendors should be terrified enough of a bad reference to deliver,” he said.

Date says UCLA Medical Center will soon be launching Concerto Clinical Documentation, a project designed to reduce the California healthcare system’s seven portals to one. The company has also been instrumental in connecting hospitals in Washington state, Tennessee and Maine.

Paul Viskovich, president of Orion Health North America and EMEA, says healthcare providers need to focus on interoperability in order to create a complete electronic health record.

“These monolithic hospital systems can’t share data with one another and as a result, health information is held hostage within that system, which is often specific to a single department within the hospital,” he said in a recent press release. “Inefficiencies run from needing to enter data multiple times, backlogs of data entry increasing the length of time to obtain test results and security and privacy issues. The issue of interoperability must be addressed before a complete health record can be created.”

“Canada’s provinces, like Alberta, have been able to make fantastic headway toward a pan-Canadian EHR by focusing on interoperability. Orion Health technology is integrating data across many of these provinces and providing healthcare professionals with the ability to access comprehensive patient data for improved diagnosis in a secure way.”