EHI Live 2010 for primary care

Professor Trisha Greenhalgh, author of an independent evaluation of the Summary Care Record and HealthSpace, will be one of the speakers at eHealth Insider Live 2010.

In what promises to be a fascinating speech on Monday 8 November, she will outline what it meant to be an independent evaluator of two controversial NHS IT programmes at a time of high political and economic turbulence.

The talk by the professor of primary care at Queen Mary, London University, will also be timely, since the coalition government’s review of the SCR’s content and consent model should be published in the interim.

Other highlights of the two day conference and exhibition for primary care include a talk from Dr William Lumb from NHS Cumbria.

He will explain how local GPs invested their own money in an informatics solution; in the face of opposition from local NHS organisations and the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

Zack Pandor, joint director of ICT for NHS Herefordshire and Herefordshire Council, will describe his area’s ground breaking shared services arrangement, which has delivered the UK’s first joint health and local government IT and information service.

And Patient Opinion chief executive Dr Paul Hodgkin will tell EHI Live 2010 how web-based feedback is changing the relationship between patients and the NHS.

Health minister Simon Burns will be giving the keynote address on day two. This will provide an opportunity for delegates to hear more about his announcement on the future of NPfIT, and about the Information Strategy that is due to be published in the next month.

Telehealth is covered in the conference’s ‘hot topics’ stream, with a talk from NHS Direct, the world’s largest provider of telephone-based telehealth services, and a session on the Whole System Demonstrator projects, which are trying to build telehealth into mainstream care pathways.

In the ‘business essentials’ stream, there will be a talk from Tony Cobain, head of information assurance for Mersey Internal Audit Agency, on whether the NHS IG Toolkit is sufficient to tackle the risks and issues facing NHS organisations on a daily basis.

There will also be talks on healthcare disaster recovery, on clinical safety testing – with specific reference to the GP2GP electronic transfer of records project, on using technology to deliver clinical quality and on the management challenges faced by senior IT staff.

Brian James, chief executive of The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, will be speaking at EHI Live 2010 on ‘implementing a paperless EPR – one year on.’ The talk will focus on the challenges and lessons learned so far, and on the business benefits the trust expects to achieve.

Online registration for the event, which will be held at the NEC in Birmingham from 8-9 November, is now open.