The system is hosted on-site at the hospital and runs on Red Hat Linux.

NetOptions' general manager of software development, Greg Thiele, said custom development was required as there was nothing available off the shelf to satisfy the hospital's requirements.

"The problem with COTS is can the customer accept the limits of the application," Thiele said, adding the good thing about development is customers get exactly what they want.

"This was really an exercise in bringing a large number of KPIs into a user interface that is usable," he said. "The hospital didn't want anyone to rekey data [so] where data existed we were extracting it and where data wasn't recorded we provided data entry in the Web interface."

Thiele said the software was developed to be flexible and the organization doesn't have to be a hospital.