Sydney, Dec 19, 2007 (ABN Newswire) - IBA Health Group Limited (ASX: IBA) - Australia's largest listed specialist information technology company, today announced an agreement with one of Australia's leading private hospital providers, Healthscope Limited.

In a deal worth over $14 million over 7.5 years, IBA will provide Healthsope's 45 medical and surgical hospitals with a company wide licence for IBA's hospital information solutions and an ongoing support and services facility.

Additional services will be provided over the life of the agreement for development, implementation and deployment services. The agreement also provides the framework for licensing and implementation of additional IBA products as Healthscope continues the vertical integration of its hospital, pathology, clinic and primary care business.

Healthscope is Australia's only national private hospital operator with a quality portfolio of hospitals and clinics in every State and Territory throughout Australia, delivering medical/surgical, rehabilitation and psychiatric services and an expanding position in Malaysia, Singapore and New Zealand.

The corporate licence agreement follows Healthsope's recent acquisitions, internal growth and impressive results as it integrates its hospital, pathology and primary care businesses. The agreement will provide Healthscope with the ability to standardise its core patient and clinical management systems using IBA's health information technology, thus reducing the cost of managing multiple business systems in individual hospitals and clinics and further reducing the overhead of delivering health information to health professionals operating in a national network of hospitals and clinics.

In a move that will accelerate electronic claiming in Australia, Healthscope and IBA will collaborate to develop and deploy electronic billing to Medicare Australia and point-of-care claiming to the health insurance funds across Healthsope's national network of hospitals and clinics.

Steve Garrington, CEO (AsiaPac MEA) for IBA said, "This agreement ratifies our work with Healthscope as being more than just a provider of IT services. The agreement paves the way for Healthscope and IBA to further explore opportunities to optimise cost and revenue synergies throughout Healthsope's integrated delivery network by leveraging the portfolio of IBA's patient-centric administrative, clinical and electronic claiming technology."