Canberra startup lets clinics run practices on Microsoft cloud

Canberra-based startup Capstone System is preparing to launch its Microsoft cloud-based application it hopes will revolutionise how the medical industry processes patients.

The company has developed an application that brings together Office 365 applicants, email and billing integration with Medicare so medical practices can run their entire practice through Microsoft’s cloud.

The system is also intended to manage a patient's journey through multiple facilities during treatment. Co-founder Tim Madden told CRN that Capstone was born out of necessity and frustration working in private medical facilities.

“Our founding environment was a healthcare facility that was expanding rapidly. They had a specialist surgeon at the centre of it and they were also bringing in GPs to run a skincare clinic and also developing their own private hospital environment to look after their positions. Their vision was wanting to really enhance and take control of the entire patient experience,” said Madden.

“We started asking what software package we were going to use to run the environment. A whole lot of R&D later, couldn’t find anything. We looked at products like Salesforce and SugarCRM to try and adapt those products. We felt like with the same resources we could build a better billing system from scratch.”

The software is sold as-a-service and has browser acccess to the Azure cloud. Madden said Azure was picked for its local data centre availability zones, as well as the amount of medical practices already using disparate Microsoft cloud services.

Capstone recently attended Microsoft’s Australia Partner Conference, which Madden said was an opportunity to look at bringing on managed services partners and other app developers to integrate their systems.

“What we’re looking for is more than a technical alignment but a value alignment. We want to bring a fresh value into the way healthcare technology is delivered, and even developed. Instead of creating a system that’s our proprietary code and our system, we want to create an environment where other people can be included,” said Madden.

Capstone will initially target the plastic and cosmetic surgery industries, and eventually branch out further into beauty, non-surgical and private hospitals. While it’s still early days, Madden said there is scope to expand its software into other verticals in the future.

Capstone’s app has been developed over the past 12 months, and is expected to launch within the next month. The company is based in Canberra and has 10 staff.

The author attended Microsoft APC as a guest of Microsoft