A New Zealand health technology company, McCrae Hospitals, has taken ownership of hospital software developed by Orion Health and signed an agreement to run it at a private hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. The signing, witnessed by New Zealand's prime minister, Christopher Luxon, and Vietnam's prime minister, Pham Minh Chinh, covers the hospital information system at Franco-Vietnamese (FV) Hospital.

McCrae Hospitals is a New Zealand-owned spinoff of Orion Health, and both were founded by Ian McCrae. Under the arrangement, FV Hospital will extend the system with a patient portal called Virtuoso, which the companies say is built to serve more than 770,000 patients and support over a thousand clinicians, with a go-live planned later this year. Orion Health's chief executive, Brad Porte, and McCrae Hospitals' chief executive, Niru Rajakumar, attended alongside FV Hospital's chief executive, Dr Jean-Marcel Guillon. Mr Luxon put New Zealand's health technology sector at NZ$2.1 billion.

Whether software travels with the patient

A portal that lets people book, check in and see their own records is a meaningful change for the patients who use it, and a private hospital is the easiest place to build one, because it already holds the records and employs the staff. The harder question lies outside those walls. Patients in Vietnam often move between public and private care, and a record that lives inside one hospital's system does not travel with them.

McCrae says it intends to work across Southeast Asia, an ambition that is stated rather than shown; the release does not name a second hospital or say what the system costs to install. Whether importing a hospital system changes care for the many, or sharpens the difference between hospitals that can afford it and those that cannot, is the question this agreement leaves standing.