OTTAWA – DINMAR, a healthcare IT vendor with headquarters in Ottawa, Canada, has deployed its Oacis clinical information system across eight hospitals in Adelaide, South Australia.

ICSGlobal Limited, an e-health company in Sydney, Australia, is partnering with a Kentucky firm – MedAccessPlus Health Informatics Network – to unveil a financial transactions system in the United States early this year.

And PowerHealth Solutions in Adelaide, South Australia, is poised to bolster its decision-support presence in North America with U.S. allies such as KaufmanHall, a financial consulting and software company in Northfield, Ill.

North American-Australian partnerships, it seems, are hot – and the healthcare IT work appears to be flowing both ways.

DINMAR, for example, just opened an office in Melbourne, Australia, as part of its contract with the South Australian Department of Health. Oacis is now deployed across Adelaide’s eight public hospitals, serving 75 percent of South Australia’s 1.5 million residents.

“The relationship goes back almost 10 years when (SADH) decided it was time to adopt a comprehensive medical record for all citizens,” said Jason Huckaby, Oacis sales director for DINMAR’s U.S. operations.

Key features of the Oacis EHR include online orders, clinical documentation and results review.

“And they are piloting the (medication-management module) for physician orders,” Huckaby said.

ICSGlobal, meanwhile, signed a letter of intent last September to offer its real-time payment-adjudication services in tandem with MedAccessPlus’s swipe card-driven electronic health records technology.

“ICSGlobal has been operating a transaction network in Australia for about five years and was looking to partner with a vendor in the United States,” said John Hardin, who serves as chief technology officer for MedAccessPlus in Manchester, Ky.

PowerHealth Solutions, which provides open-based cost management software and other tools, already is well known in Australia and New Zealand, and it sees a “huge opportunity” here, says Paul Evans, managing director of PowerHealth Solutions North America in Englewood, Colo.

Not surprisingly, North American vendors with an Australian stake say there are lessons to be learned Down Under, especially for the regional deployment of electronic patient records.

Granted, Australia’s federally funded healthcare IT effort “allows for somewhat more advanced consideration in how to achieve that objective,” said Huckaby. “But there are lots of themes in Australia that are precursors to what we’re trying to do in North America.”