As eClinic begins ramping up the online delivery of pathology and radiology test results to Australian doctors, the online business and its partners expect bring medical practices' technology up to date. eClinic is an aggregator of medical services for doctors in Victoria and South Australia.

It currently delivers medical test results from the Gribbles Group pathology laboratories to about 200 doctors through its site and has processed 13,000 results to date. The system was launched in a trial phase in December 2000 and has been operating live for about two months. The marketing campaign for the online service, headed up by Gribbles, will begin this month, targeting 6,500 doctors.

Saurabh Mishra, a co-founder of eclinic, said he believed this would lead to at least 200 additional doctors registering for the service every month this year. The online delivery and access of medical results from Gribbles is ensured by a pubic key infrastucture (PKI) developed and managed by esign Australia. Security is the main concern for doctors taking up accessing information on the net, and this level of security was necessary to ensure confidence in the integrity and privacy of the data - but also posed some technological challenges for bringing users up to grade, Mishra said.

eClinic and Gribbles have had to upgrade the interet browsers used by some doctors to versions that support 128-bit encryption and digital certificates. eClinic focused on making the registration and Installation process as streamlined and simple as possible so that participating doctors could have a choice of installing the digital certificate themselves, in a process of about half a dozen steps, or having a representative from Gribbles come their practice and do it them

eClinic anticipated that some doctors would not have PCs or be online, or may need to upgrade their systems, so it established deals with IBM to offer competitive rates to clients. "We are not so much trying to be a reseller, as offer a one-stop service," Mishra said.

Other services the site is launching this month include e-procurement of medical and office consumables from Livingstone International and online ordering of pharmaceutical samples from a range of drug companies. The company, which employs 10 full-time staff and up to six contractors, operates on a transaction-based business model - with flat fees or percentage-of transaction based fees depending on the service type.

No fees are charged to the doctors registered for the service. Initially, funding for the start-up was provided by Capital Creation in May 2000 and the company is now in its second round of fundraising. Market scepticism about dotcoms does not apply to eClinic, co-founder Sanjiv Puri said: 'A lot of over-hyped players have come into this market with big promises. We have kept a low profile, worked on it and are on target to deliver services to GPs. That is a plus for the industry."