ASX BRIEFS

ALCIDION GROUP LTD (ALC) - Revolutionizing Patient Care: How Alcidion's Technology is Transforming Healthcare Systems Worldwide

• Andrew Musgrave

Share episode

Send us a text

Healthcare systems worldwide face unprecedented challenges: aging populations, staffing shortages, and the need for greater efficiency without compromising care quality. Kate Quirke, CEO and Managing Director of Alcidion Group Limited, offers a vision of how intelligent technology is meeting these challenges head-on.

In this revealing conversation, Kate introduces us to Miya Precision, Alcidion's flagship platform that's transforming healthcare delivery across Australia, the UK, and New Zealand. At its core, this solution integrates disparate healthcare systems and data, giving clinicians critical information "in the moments that matter" – whether at the patient bedside or when making operational decisions.

What makes Alcidion's approach unique is their commitment to simplicity and mobility. As Kate explains, today's healthcare professionals expect solutions that are intuitive and accessible anywhere, requiring minimal training while delivering maximum impact. This philosophy has propelled Alcidion to significant milestones, including a landmark £40 million contract with North Cumbria NHS Trust and their first expansion into Wales.

Looking toward the future, we explore Alcidion's careful approach to AI integration, balancing innovation with regulatory compliance and patient safety. With upgraded financial guidance showing EBITDA expected to exceed $3 million in FY25 and positive cash flow, this self-described "sleeping giant" in health tech demonstrates how technological innovation can address healthcare's most pressing challenges while building a sustainable business.

Subscribe to ASX Briefs for more conversations with leaders reshaping Australia's innovation landscape and discover how technology is transforming our most essential industries.

Andrew Musgrave Host

Welcome back to ASX Briefs, where we speak to leaders shaping Australia's innovation economy. And today we're joined by Kate Quirke, the CEO and Managing Director of Alcidion Group Limited, an Australian health tech company empowering clinicians through intelligent, interoperable digital health solutions, and is focused on revolutionising healthcare with its flagship platform, Miya Precision. Kate, thanks for joining me today and welcome to the ASX Briefs podcast. 

Kate Quirke Guest

Thanks for having me. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Now Kate for investors that may be unfamiliar with Alcidion Group, can you just start by giving a brief overview of the company? 

Kate Quirke Guest

Thanks. Alcidion was founded really on a simple belief, and that is that the use of technology can really drive meaningful change in healthcare. It really supports that change and we've developed a platform called Miya Precision, and what it does is it integrates all the systems and data across healthcare, designed to then make it easier for clinicians and administrators and people in healthcare to access that data and use that data to support decision making in the moments that matter, and that can be both at the patient bedside, in terms of having more information available to make better decisions, or it can be about how do I manage the overall healthcare system better and more efficiently. So, we're really focused on supporting clinicians to make better patient decisions and people who are running healthcare systems to focus on efficiency and productivity. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and congratulations on the landmark deal with North Cumbria NHS Trust. So, what does this win signal about Alcidion’s standing in the UK digital health market?

Kate Quirke Guest

Alcidion signed a long-term contract with North Cumbria a couple of months back now for the provision of the Miya Precision platform to form the basis of their electronic patient record, consolidating the existing systems they had with the modules that Alcidion provides. The contract itself is just under $40 million over 10 years, with an option to expand that, both in additional modules and length of time. It's the largest single contract that Alcidion's ever signed. The largest one prior to that was with Leidos, who are providing our solution into manage all of the healthcare data for the Australian Defence Force. So, whilst it's not the first UK deal Alcidion has secured it, is by far the most significant in that it provides, you know, North Cumbria is a hospital and community health service provider that supports about half a million people. They're responsible for delivering over 70 acute and community services across 15 different locations in the north of the United Kingdom or the north of England, and they have around 6,500 employees. And so, you know we have been steadily increasing our market share in the UK and in this financial year it'll be just over half of our revenue, and that's from back in 2018, when they made up about 10% of our revenue. So, we've steadily been increasing, but with this very significant win, adding to some of our other customers. It really cements us as a provider to the NHS. 

Andrew MusgraveHost

Okay, and this EPR deployment is described as modular and mobile friendly. So, what specific innovations are resonating with clinicians in this new phase of digital maturity? 

Kate Quirke Guest

So, as I said, we've built a platform and it has a number of modules or apps from that, Miya Precision being the platform and those apps are designed to really address issues as they emerge.

So over time we continue to add to that capability, very focused, as I said at the outset, on supporting clinicians in their decision-making, but also those operational challenges that are really prevalent in healthcare today around patient flow. How do you move a patient from the ambulance all the way through the healthcare system and back to home as efficiently and quickly as possible to free up beds? How do you ensure that all the information that is needed is available at a clinician's fingertips? So what clinicians are expecting now is that the solutions that they're given are easy to use, that there shouldn't be a significant amount of training required, the information should be readily available at the most one or two clicks to get to what is important to them and that it's available wherever they are. So mobile capability is really important to clinicians these days. So, at the end of the day, we want to make sure that they're spending less time with technology and information and more time with their patients. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and you've also made your first inroads into Wales, so can you talk about the contracts that you've signed there and how it might pave the way for further growth in that region? 

Kate Quirke Guest

Yeah, it's exciting to be in a new country and it obviously continues to demonstrate that the proposition that Alcidion has with Miya Precision resonates in healthcare services around the world. Whilst Wales is very closely aligned to England, it has its own approach to delivery of healthcare. It's quite separate from the NHS in England so it was excellent for us to get our first deployment into a health board in that country. The contract again includes Miya Precision. 

Not all of the modules like there is in the North Cumbria deal, so there's an opportunity over time to add to that. But they have been very focused on again that efficiency of patients moving through the healthcare system, looking at patient flow, but also using our system to support nurses in the gathering of all the observations and information that they do multiple times a day for every patient. It's around $5.5 million in value over five years and again the option to extend that for more years and for additional modules as well. The Hywel Dda themselves serves around 380,000 people across the west of Wales, both acute and community as well. They have a lot of community health services that are integrated into the hospital environment, and we're going to be providing a platform that will allow them to see information across all of those facilities, no matter who's treating the patient. 

 

 

 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay and Miya Precision has been adopted in various formats across both ANZ and the UK. So, what makes the platform so adaptable across different health systems in different geographies? 

Kate Quirke Guest

So, Miya's a cloud-based platform, so we've built it purposely to be deployed in the cloud, so, again, we can take away that need for healthcare systems to have that technology capability on the ground. It has multiple modules, but the platform itself is the same. Because we're extracting data from systems, it allows us to consolidate that data into an international standard called FHIR, and that is a standard that's used the world over, and because we used that as our core on which the data and the platform was stored, it allows us to readily move across geographies without needing to make changes to the underlying systems. The challenges in healthcare are pretty much the same worldwide. We've got an ageing population increasing complexity in terms of patients with chronic, long-term needs. We don't have enough capacity or hospital beds to support those patients, so the ability to actually use that data to increase efficiency and make patient care easier, no matter where the patient is located, is something that resonates, I think, the world over. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, now just touching on the financials. You've upgraded the FY25 guidance, with EBITDA expected to exceed $3 million and full-year cash flow to be positive. So, what's been the key to achieving this financial inflection point? 

Kate Quirke Guest

After a slightly challenging post-COVID period that really impacted all of healthcare, we've really now moved back into an acceleration phase. During COVID we did pretty well but post that period for a year or two the healthcare systems have been very much focused on how do I get enough staff into the environment. We're now really moving through that phase and so we've had an excellent year in FY25. We've completed more than 100 clinical integrations in Australia. They're lucrative, long-term contracts and all of them have the capacity to expand in size and value and in tenure. In the past three or four months alone, we've signed major deals with two health services in Victoria, one in South Australia, two in the UK and that one I talked about in Wales. 

So, we're really now moving to a point where we've got referenceability in all jurisdictions in Australia as well as across a number of other jurisdictions in the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Alcidion is a bit of a sleeping giant really in the health tech scene and some would argue a bit undervalued in respect of the opportunity that's ahead of us and what we've achieved. I think, as we see this momentum continuing to build and our continued success and increasing success in selection by customers and with profitability guaranteed in this year and a focus for the years to come, I think we'll start to see an understanding of the value of what we do. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

And Alcidions success includes strong recurring revenue from longstanding PCS customers. So how are you nurturing those relationships and evolving your offerings for them? 

Kate Quirke Guest

So, PCS was a product we acquired in the UK during COVID. It's a patient administration demographic solution that's been around a long time. We also acquired another company called Extramed and our strategy there has been really to take the Miya Precision platform to those existing customers and demonstrate the additional value that we can bring whilst continuing to evolve the solutions that we acquired. So you know, I think what that has done is given us an increasing market share and increasing opportunity, and the combination of Miya Precision with that PCS solution is really what enabled us to be one of the many things that enabled us to be successful in sites like North Cumbria and you know, we hope to be able to repeat that in other sites in the months and years ahead. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and clinical decision support remains core to your mission. So, what's next on the roadmap for AI or real-time analytic capabilities in the Miya suite? 

Kate Quirke Guest

Well, AI is obviously the word that's on everybody's lips and I think it's something that we've actually had embedded in the solution for some time. 

We've been really focused historically on using predictive analytics, and how do you use historical data and machine learning capabilities to predict what your healthcare system might look like? 

So how many beds am I going to have available in 48 hours? That sort of information is really critical if you're trying to plan the most efficient use of your resources in healthcare. But, as we've seen the advent of large language models and generative AI, obviously there's a lot of emphasis now starting to go on how these can be used in healthcare. We are working with Google as a partner, who have really invested a lot in Google Gemini and its ability to support healthcare large language models. Having said that, we need to be very mindful of the regulatory environment that we operate in and the risks that are inherent risks that can be implied with using large language models, where what goes on within the model is not necessarily available and open to doctors to understand. So, we're working with our customers and within the regulatory constraints as they're being released, to ensure that we use AI to support clinicians having more time for patient care, but to do so in a really safe manner. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Now, finally, looking ahead to FY26. What will success look like for the company, both commercially and in terms of healthcare impact? 

Kate Quirke Guest

Well, we're incredibly excited about the impact we're having in healthcare. We've just recently consolidated a lot of the return on investment data that we've been getting from some of our customers, and we can conservatively demonstrate that we've had a billion-dollar impact, you know, over the course of a year on healthcare, in terms of savings from time and so forth. So, we want to continue to see that impact and be able to demonstrate that impact for our customers. Looking ahead, I think success is obviously around continuing to demonstrate the positive impact we're having in the healthcare environment whilst at the same time, you know, supporting our shareholders' trust and confidence in us by continuing to operate the business in a growth environment but with profitability at hand, and we're well-placed to do that now with referenceability in sight, a really, you know, optimised operating cost base as well. So very much looking forward to the next 12 months and beyond. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

All right, Kate. Well, thanks for your time today. It's been great to get an update on the company, and we look forward to further updates from Alcidion in the upcoming months. 

Kate Quirke Guest

Pleasure and thank you. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

That concludes this episode of ASX Briefs. Don't forget to subscribe and we look forward to catching you on our next episode.