Odin Health Files Prospectus: New Zealand-Based Healthcare Integration Engine Provider Targets Expansion with Localized Solutions in China

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In 2018, the Bureau of Medical Administration and Healthcare Reform issued an official document requiring that all tertiary hospitals within their jurisdictions achieve Level 4 or above in the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Application Level Grading Evaluation by 2020, realize hospital-wide information sharing, and possess clinical decision support capabilities.

Over the past two years, the Chinese government has implemented sweeping reforms in the field of healthcare informatization, with a primary focus on electronic medical records (EMR). The main objectives of national policies and guidelines are regional data sharing, data application, resource integration, and business collaboration. Driven by these policies, the construction of integration platforms has become a key component of hospital informatization development.

Odin Health is an innovative high-tech company dedicated to providing integration engines. Established in New Zealand in 2014, it was awarded a national-level innovation grant in New Zealand in 2018. Since its inception, Odin Health has regarded China as a key market, committing to deliver forward-looking healthcare software to the country, and successfully implemented its first project in China in December 2014.

Why Did Odin Health Choose China as Its Foundation for Global Expansion? How Will It Achieve Product Localization in the Future? Mr. Alan, Head of Operations at Odin Health, Provided Detailed Answers to These Questions.

Odin Health (Image provided by the interviewee)

“In Alan’s view, although China’s healthcare informatics industry started later, its rapid growth and strong innovation capability are more conducive to the implementation of new technologies and solutions. In addition, the country’s large population has given rise to a vast number of medical institutions and enterprises, among which there are significant differences in standardization and complex usage scenarios. These market factors are not all present in other countries. ‘In other words, technologies and products that can meet the demands of the Chinese market will find it easier to gain traction abroad,’ said Alan.”

“Odin provides solutions for today and tomorrow.” Odin Health not only offers integration engines and multi-functional data service engines to address the urgent integration challenges in current healthcare informatization, but also provides data exchange middleware for the PaaS layer of healthcare IT systems, enabling efficient data exchange services in cloud environments and meeting the collaboration needs among heterogeneous systems from numerous vendors. Alan stated that after extensive exchanges and technical validations with many leading domestic HIT vendors, healthcare institutions, and industry experts both in China and abroad, Odin Health has customized its technical roadmap and adjusted product functionalities based on actual business scenarios and requirements in China, helping project teams alleviate their pain points.

In accordance with the national guidelines and requirements for medical informatization industry standards, including electronic medical records (EMR), interoperability, and smart hospitals, Odin Health has implemented extensive compliance-oriented extensions and optimizations in database operations and product standardization. By adapting standardized interaction services and componentizing elements such as Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and data sets, Odin Health has reduced the complexity of standardization upgrades for healthcare institutions.

“As the nation places increasing emphasis on the integration, standardization, and normalization of healthcare informatization, and with the rapid development of new information technologies—particularly the promotion and application of cloud computing, internet-based healthcare, and 5G technology—it is foreseeable that information integration will gradually evolve toward intelligent dynamic systems, microservices, and grid integration based on distributed containers.” Alan believes that integration is no longer a simple application upgrade; both architectural design and the underlying technology stack are poised for a new technological revolution. “The PaaS cloud model from the internet industry has demonstrated technical feasibility for healthcare information integration and is bound to disrupt the existing technological landscape.”

It is evident that data exchange middleware, as an essential foundational component, plays a crucial role in implementing business middle platforms and data middle platforms within the healthcare industry. This transformation also presents significant challenges and opportunities for the market of data exchange middleware in the healthcare sector.

Currently, among the top 12 listed healthcare IT vendors in China by revenue, no fewer than half have adopted Odin Health’s engine products. Its products are also the designated integration engines for Winning Health and B-Soft, two HIT companies listed on the ChiNext board. Odin Health has assisted hospitals in passing evaluations such as the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system maturity assessment, the Interconnectivity Maturity Assessment, and achieving HIMSS EMRAM Stage 6 certification. Its products are now deployed in over one hundred hospitals across China.

Since its inception, Odin Health has adopted a forward-looking approach to product planning, resulting in multiple updates and iterations. Its product evolution began with traditional point-to-point integration engines (IE) designed to address “information silos,” progressed to multifunctional data engines (MDE) equipped with big data support and National CDA standards to meet service coordination and data extraction needs, and has now advanced to the next-generation data service platform (NeXT), which is oriented toward regionalization and internet-based services. As business integration becomes increasingly comprehensive, market demands for technologies and strategic directions in healthcare IT integration continue to rise.

Alan stated that with the impact of cloud technology, the internet, and 5G on healthcare informatization, healthcare IT has gradually evolved from closed internal systems into a socialized ecosystem. The rapidly growing demand for information exchange continues to pose challenges to information integration technologies.

The characteristics of 5G facilitate easier and more extensive medical data exchange, enable real-time monitoring of a broader range of health data, promote the widespread adoption of remote collaboration, and make the application of medical cloud and cloud-native architectures more prevalent. Correspondingly, the development of future hospitals and regional health information platforms will exhibit the following trends: an increase in the volume of connected systems, services, and data, along with high business concurrency; stringent requirements for real-time performance and continuous availability; complex and dynamic business needs; and the integration of numerous new services and technologies.

NeXT emerged against this backdrop.

NeXT is the next-generation engine officially launched by Odin Health in June 2019, designed and developed based on distributed, container-native cloud data exchange technologies. To meet stringent requirements for high performance, high availability, robust stability, and resilience, Odin Health has transformed its integration middleware into a comprehensive healthcare data service platform. Key features such as “granular resource management, project isolation, API policy management, flexible plug-and-play extensibility, reactive data streaming, and intelligent project execution” have been progressively introduced.

NeXT aligns with the high-bandwidth, low-latency characteristics of 5G, integrates internet-based architectures for high concurrency and high availability, proactively implements microservices and dynamic container deployment, and supports IoT application protocols such as MQTT to establish data pathways for the Internet of Things. Supporting deployment models including private cloud, dedicated cloud, public cloud, and federated cloud, NeXT provides a comprehensive data exchange solution to meet the growing industry demands of hospital groups, medical consortia, medical communities, and regional/internet healthcare.

Alan revealed that, moving forward, Odin Health will intensify its marketing efforts while introducing innovative technologies from abroad. The company will also engage in product and technical collaborations at the PaaS layer with leading domestic cloud providers and prominent industry vendors, thereby building a strategic ecosystem encompassing cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and big data, centered around data exchange.

Furthermore, the Odin Health engine is not limited to applications in the healthcare industry. Odin Health is currently expanding into other sectors and actively seeking strategic partners to deliver universal data services. Institutions interested in the company should contact Xiaoyun, the financing assistant, at DongMai_Investent.