Customers using Amisys healthcare applications were in short supply at the Interex e3000 Solutions Symposium, but the few users there woke up on the show’s last full day to learn their future lay along the same path that HP was blazing at the California show: heading for the hills of Unix. Amisys LLC officials issued a press release that reports the company expects to have an HP-UX version of the product for sale in June of next year. To be called Amisys Advance, the software is supposed to preserve business processes and change as little as possible for the 115 Amisys sites across North America. The first version will not include a graphical user interface.

Amisys sites can count on only the 11.01 release of their application for any more MPE/iX functionality. Due in August, this release is the software the healthcare companies will be using to achieve compliance with the US government regulations to expand privacy around patient records. These HIPAA regs must be met in the same year Amisys hopes to begin migrating its customers. The company apparently will create an HP-UX version in less than a year and a half — a goal that eluded its development team during four years of work in the late 1990s — by devoting most of its current programmers to the port. COO Kathleen McCarthy said that “We want to make sure that current customers and other health plans considering our software understand we’re committed to transitioning to the new platform as smoothly and rapidly as possible. We’ve formed our staff into a series of teams that will deal with phases of this project.”

CEO Steve Rock said the choice to move to HP-UX was based on time to market. The company formed a transition committee to determine its options. The committee included “several customers and industry and technical experts,” according to an Amisys press release. “That input played an important part in the decision to transition to HP-UX,” McCarthy said. “Functionality, scalability and ease of implementation were everyone’s highest priorities. We believe the HP-UX platform will meet all those needs.”

Amisys plans to have a prototype of the new application available for preview this fall, and will begin beta tests of the new software in March of 2003. A second version of the HP-UX release will add a graphical user interface, a version Amisys promises to release by January 2004. Release 10 will be supported through June of 2004, and the final, 11.01 MPE/iX release of the app will be supported through 2006.