Dean Street Express wins EHI Awards 2014

An innovative sexual health clinic, that uses technology to offer a fast, automated service to most of its users, emerged as the overall winner at the EHI Awards last night.

Dean Street Express, based in London’s Soho, is run by Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust; but looks more like a super-modern office with a bar than a traditional healthcare clinic.

Its Lilie IT system, from Blithe Computer Systems, enables visitors to check-in using touch-screens, pick up a testing kit, collect a swab with the help of video instructions, and have it processed on site by a GeneXpert Infinity lab, provided by Cepheid. Visitors receive their results by SMS; often within minutes.

The EHI Awards judges said the clinic, which also won ‘best use of IT to support healthcare business efficiency’, was a superb example of how IT can be used to completely re-engineer a healthcare process; and one that pointed the way toward a more automated, mobile-focused future for some services.

This year’s EHI Awards received almost 300 entries. Representatives of the projects in the running to be on the shortlist attended a judging day at Reading’s Madjeski stadium in July.

Well over 650 people travelled to Camden’s iconic Roundhouse to discover who had won, to see the 12 category awards winners on stage, and to see the overall winner announced.

Linda Davidson, director of EHealth Media, wrote in the programme for the evening that as the whole process had gone on, it had come to be summed up by one word – “amazeballs.”

“’Amazeballs’ was chosen as one of the new entries in the Oxford English Dictionary this year, and is defined as: ‘Extremely good or impressive; amazing’,” she wrote. “So we would like to say, officially, using the EHI Awards team’s favourite word, that all our finalists are – amazeballs.”

In addition to the category winners, a number of individual awards were made. These included the ‘CCIO award for clinical informatics leadership’, which went to Dr Paul Upton of Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, and the new ‘rising start of 2014’ award, which went to David Newton of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.

The Healthcare IT Champion of the Year award, which is decided by EHI readers, went to Dr Rick Jones, the former specialist advisor to NHS England’s National Pathology Programme, and a consultant at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

Sadly, Dr Jones passed away after he was nominated; but his friends and family asked for his name to go forward, and were present at the Roundhouse to hear that he had been the winner.

Read all about the speeches and get all the reaction from the overwhelmed winners in our feature, 'Widdecombe Fair.'