Amisys execs reach for Transition plans

Healthcare application to serve through HP support timeframe; migration to begin

HP comments about an eroding HP 3000 ecosystem appear aimed squarely at the community’s application providers, companies such as Amisys. But while that provider of healthcare payor software operates under new management this year, decisions and efforts from prior years are shaping the future for its customers using the application on their HP 3000s in the Transition era.

Amisys reorganized as Amisys LLC this year, after being purchased from McKessonHBOC by Platinum Equity Holdings. The LLC combines the assets, resources and customers of both the Amisys entity and Synertech, an ASP and administrative outsourcer to the healthcare industry. Synertech CEO Steve Rock became CEO of the new LLC, joining long-time Amisys executive Kathleen McCarthy, who’s serving as COO.

The new entity had planned a two-day meeting with 140 of its customers near the old Amisys headquarters in Maryland, a technical conference with a significant date: November 14, the same day HP announced its plans to end its support of the HP 3000. Rock and McCarthy were scheduled for one-on-one meetings with customers and a general briefing on the business plans of the new LLC. While the news didn’t come as a total shock to the management team — HP gave them about a week’s advance notice — the timing was not completely expected.

“We knew that was a possibility going forward,” Rock said, “and we’re a very technology-savvy organization, so we understood it could happen. The speed with which it happened took us a little by surprise.”

A detailed plan should be formed within the next few months, he added. Rock said he told customers the HP announcement was a “good thing, and HP is making the right decision. Now we have to work with our customers to work through that.”

HP’s launch of that work in the transition era comes at a delicate time for the Amisys customer base. The hospitals, HMOs and PPOs using the software are working to comply with new US federal privacy regulations, called HIPAA. They are just starting to use enhanced versions of the Amisys application on their HP 3000s to help meet the regulations. Life in the Amisys customer base has revolved around custom implementations of the application, and until the company was sold this year, that custom work had been put on hold.

The sale of the company executed about a year or so after McKessonHBOC executives threw in the towel on creating Amisys Open, a version of the application which would run on Unix-based systems.

Through those years when development of a non-3000 solution was the company’s focus, sales of new HP 3000s dwindled to zero, while prospects waited for a Unix version of the software to ship. Amisys recorded its first new HP 3000 sale this fall after months without new installations.

McCarthy, the new entity’s COO, acted as Amisys general manager after the decision to step away from Amisys Open. She said the work on a non-3000 version of the application delivered valuable lessons, but not much code that can be leveraged in the company’s transition off MPE/iX.

“We spent several years developing a product on an open platform here,” she said, “so we have experience with the processes, which gives us a leg up in whatever we’re going to do in the future.” Documentation for the Amisys Open product won technical awards, even through the application was never installed successfully at a customer site.

As for the code itself, “The software has been sitting on the shelf for two years, so there would be a tremendous amount of catching up to do in technology of some of the products we used,” McCarthy explained. “I don’t believe we’ll be using the software in moving forward.”

Despite the long road to replacing the 3000 software, new software is emerging from Amisys LLC. At the conference the company announced Amisys Web Exchange, a Web integration package which it will deploy to the customer base in several months for an additional charge. It provides Web-browser desktops for looking up information, both from a provider’s operations as well as out in the providers’ customer bases, employers whose workers subscribe to the healthcare plans.

Amisys plans to make licenses for new HP 3000s available to customers during the next two years, Rock said, jointly marketed with the Synertech ASP offerings. But once HP halts sales of new systems, Amisys officials see problems with continuing to sell the 3000-based software — even if an OpenMPE movement takes hold (see Page 1.)

“Long-term, people are not going to be able to repair their machines or buy new equipment,” Rock said, “so it’s not likely that would be our option. There’s a lot more than the operating system that has to be supported here,” Rock said.

Sometime over the next five years the company will set a date for its customers to move off the system, “and we will be developing plans to give our customers options.”

McCarthy said the company’s first initiative is to follow HP’s support life for the e3000. “We plan to support both the product and the operating system through its entire life,” she said. “We haven’t had time to fully consider all the options. Depending on how things work out, some of that may change.”