Lankan company wins international award

A new Sri Lankan computer company, Lunar Technologies (Pvt) Ltd, has won an international award for innovative hospital software. Judged by the editors of the magazine Computer World, the award was sponsored by the US company Intersystems who produce the Cache database in which the software was written.

Intersystems were celebrating, in Orlando, Florida, 30 years of their own innovation in computer database development.

The software was recently installed in the Eastern Province where it now stores information on all patients admitted to the government hospitals in the Batticaloa District. The software was developed for the Ministry of Healthcare and Nutrition in collaboration with the World Health Organisation.

The development was funded by the Austrian/Swiss Red Cross using money raised for tsunami-hit areas. Work started on the project in July 2006. The first small hospital (Chenkalady Rural Hospital) started using computers in February 2007. The first large hospital in the project (Batticaloa Teaching Hospital) started in April 2007. By the end of 2007, 11 hospitals in Batticaloa District were using computers.

The Chairman of Lunar Technologies Gamini Karunaratne said, "Although the MDS software is not a complete Hospital Information System it does provide a basic medical record for the patient. Hospital staff find it easy to use compared to the old system of writing everything in a book. As well as notifying infectious diseases, the software provides hospital directors with useful information to help run their hospitals.

And in every one of those 11 government hospitals it is the nurses and doctors who are entering the medical data, not administrators or clerks."