The maker of one of the leading healthcare solutions laid off 36 employees in the weeks before HP World, a fact discussed out in the open of the SIG-AMISYS meeting at the show. The new owners of Amisys/3000 did not send an official representative to the meeting, but dedicated development manager John Schick drove the three hours from Davenport, Iowa to Chicago and paid his own way into the show, communicating in an informal talk what’s going on at inside the new Amisys LLC.

“There’s been a lot of management decisions made about the direction of the company, about how to match revenue with expenses,” said the manager. “It all came to a head [in mid-August] with layoffs of 36 people in the company, a lot of them in Rockville, but around the country. It was strictly a matter of [new owners] Platinum Equity looking at the bottom line. Most of the layoffs were in management in administrative positions, and the Quality Assurance department took a hit. It’s hard to say that’s a good thing, but I think in the area of QA we can take this opportunity to do a better job in QA,” Schick said, adding that the development side of Amisys LLC could take the downsizing in QA as a challenge to do better up front testing, “and produce a better product as a result.” Further layoffs aren’t expected at Amisys.

Release 11 of the software made its cutoff a few weeks before the conference, is now in QA, and is scheduled to be released in the beginning of 2002. Platinum is committed to future releases of Amisys/3000 to make the application HIPPA compliant. “They didn’t buy us to shut us down,” the manager said. “They bought us to make some money.” A performance enhancement to the health database SERVICEA master, reducing the size of that dataset, will be part of the newest release. Sites can reduce the size of SERVICEA in half, in most cases, gaining disk space advantages along with more speed.. SIG members took on Schick as a liaison officer from Amisys, as well as new chairman Thomas Cook and officer Elvis Buffong in the meeting.