E-Health Insider’s industry news roundup 28.09.07

E-Health Insider’s industry news round up for the week ending 28 September, featuring product launches, implementations and appointments.

Innovations

• Video games could help in the battle against hospital ‘superbugs’. A pilot project is using computer games to help make healthcare staff more aware of potentially fatal hospital infections such as MRSA and c. difficile. The ‘games-based learning’ pilot is being orchestrated by VEGA. Staff at Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Trust and the North West Ambulance Service Trust are the first to use the video games.
• Wakefield Council is helping people to achieve a better quality of life by using telecare technology. The Lifeline Unit is connected by a conventional phone socket to the monitoring centre and alerts a trained operator within seconds. If users feel unwell they can press a personal pendant and speak to an operator, even if they are not in the same room as the telephone. The trained operator will know who is calling and the telephone numbers of the caller’s carers, relatives, neighbours, G.P and emergency services.
• Accenture and Bristol-Myers Squibb Company have launched the pharmaceutical industry’s first joint center for pharmacovigilance. Pharmacovigilance is the monitoring of safety data to ensure optimal use of medicines. Operated by more than 140 Accenture employees, the new center will undertake the processing and coding of adverse event data and the generation of regulatory periodic and aggregate reports on safety as well as review of adverse events.

Implementations

• The West London Mental Health NHS Trust has rolled out the Touchpaper IT Business Management Suite to over 2,500 members of staff across 30 sites. The solution has been implemented to optimise the trust’s service desk and support functions – helping its staff to better resolve user incidents and queries.
• iSoft has won contracts totalling £1m for a technology refresh of laboratory information systems at nine NHS trusts in Wales. The deal includes iSoft’s latest i.Laboratory TP application providing an InterSystems Caché environment. It also ensures that all NHS trusts in Wales will run the same version of i.Laboratory TP as two other trusts upgraded earlier this year. iSoft will migrate the nine trusts to new IBM servers and provide ongoing support.
• Initiate Systems, specialists in master data management solutions for creating complete, real-time views of data about people, places and things, has been placed in the “Visionaries” section of the Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Integration Hubs, report released this month by Gartner.
• Liquidlogic, provider of collaborative software to the public sector, says it now has a 13,5% market share of the Children’s Services market for Integrated Children’s Systems in England. Liquidlogic says twenty local authorities have signed up to its PROTOCOL Integrated Children’s System. Ten local authority sites have already gone live and another ten local authorities are in the process of implementing Liquidlogic’s DCSF compliant solution.
• The North West NHS Collaborative Procurement Hub is using QlikTech to consolidate data from multiple financial and purchasing systems and turn it into useful information to enable quick and easy analyses of financial data from 38 separate trusts.
• Chesterfield Wheelchair Service has adopted Ethitec’s Wheelchair Module, to enable greater flexibility in service management and care delivery. From managing assessment clinics to general stock control, the ELMS2 Wheelchair Module is designed to map and support the day to day operations of a busy wheelchair service.

Appointments

• BridgeForward Software, a provider of application integration technology has announced that Karl Reti has joined the company as chief technology officer and Kevin O’Brien has been appointed senior vice president, sales. Karl Reti, most recently served as a senior director at Sybase, where he was the principal architect of Sybase WorkSpace.