EHI’s industry round up 7.8.2009

This month’s E-Health Insider industry round-up covers forthcoming events, system deployments and other developments in healthcare IT.

£1 billion ICT frameworks out to tender

The government has up to £1 billion worth of ICT framework deals out to tender. The two year framework agreements being put in place by Buying Solutions will be available to public sector organisations, including NHS trusts, police, and local councils. Systems covered include telephony and unified communications equipment and infrastructure and RFID equipment and services. All technology will have to comply with future public sector network standards for interoperability.

Companies join forces to pass CfH compliance test

Ten home-delivery stoma and continence care companies have made a joint investment in passing NHS Connecting for Health common assurance process so their IT systems can access the NHS Spine. The companies worked with Quicksilva to spread the cost develop software for compliance testing. Andrew Leese, managing director of Trent Direct, one of the companies in the consortium, said: “Before we met with Quicksilva we felt as though we were in a no-win situation.”

Swindon selects Kainos for document management

Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has chosen IT consulting company Kainos to implement an electronic document and records management project to improve the way it handles corporate documents. The project is the first phase of a wider electronic document and records management programme. In the first phase, a SharePoint solution will be created. Policy and procedure documents will be moved into SharePoint libraries, so that indexing and search capabilities can be added and version control, audit and sign-off procedures implemented. This work will form the foundation of the later phases.

Olympus saves London Hospitals’ blood

Barts and the London NHS Trust has reported savings in blood stock, staff time and costs after installing remote issue blood refrigerators from Olympus UK. Staff at its three hospitals can directly access stock stored in BloodTrack HemoNine remote issue blood fridges, without the main blood bank having to prepare, transport and track units. The trust has seen a 60% decrease in the units transported to remote clinical sites and a 50% decrease in blood units wasted.

SNOMED and HL7 book available online

Chapters of Tim Benson’s new book, ‘Principles of Health Interoperability HL7 and SNOMED’ are now available online. The book aims to break down the documentation of HL7 and SNOMED, which runs into thousands of pages, and to provide a clear introduction to the core principles for health IT professionals, students, clinicians and healthcare managers. The book will be published by Springer in November.

UHB Connectvision screensaver wins award

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust has been awarded the Best Internal Communications Award 2009 by the Association of Healthcare Communicators, for its Connectvision screensaver project. The screensavers and digital signage deliver UHB’s InVision multimedia messaging channel, which allows more than 10,000 staff, patients and visitors to see information on the screens. The communications department has been inundated with requests for information to be added to the screensaver from staff across the trust.

Business improvement experts set-up healthcare division

KM&T, which specializes in applying Lean thinking, has established a healthcare division after increased interest from NHS trusts. Steve Casey, director of healthcare, said: “We have completed over 50 projects across the UK, from whole hospital organisation transformation down to smaller improvement projects in areas such as Accident and Emergency. Our advice and the adoption of our methods have brought identifiable benefits not only for patients but for staff morale.”