Healthcare IT news in brief

Staffordshire delays RiO implementation

Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Partnership NHS Trust has delayed the implementation of Servelec’s RiO electronic patient record until spring 2016. The trust was originally meant to go live with the first phase of implementation in November 2015 in its community hospitals in North Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent. However, a spokesperson for the trust said that responsibility for some of these services had been transferred to nearby University Hos​pitals of North Midlands NHS Trust, leading to the delay.

Wales sets up clinical informatics council

A Welsh Clinical Informatics Council has been set up to bring together health board clinicians to provide direction for national IT products and services. The council is a forum set up to engage directly with clinicians from the health boards and representatives from nursing and therapies. It will replace some of the existing clinical reference groups. Each health board will have two clinical representatives on the council, who will be expected to lead local clinical informatics groups within their own health boards, creating a clinical informatics network across Wales.

Dorset Hospital upgrades infrastructure with ANS technology

Managed services and cloud provider ANS Group has upgraded the technology infrastructure at Dorset County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust connecting devices, equipment and hospital furniture to its network. The hospital can electronically location track specialist equipment, hospital beds and wheelchairs throughout the site and provides wireless Internet access to patients throughout their stay.

New advances in cancer diagnosis by Coventry scientists

Scientists in Coventry are using technology known as The Omnyx Precision Solution, a high-tech computer system that is able to read samples of human tissue and aid pathologists in the identification of minute changes in cells that can indicate cancer is present.  More than 10,000 slides were examined in the first phase of a study, which shows that pathologists are as good at accurately diagnosing cancer on a computer as they are with a microscope. 

NHS SBS almost halves payment time

NHS Shared Business Services has almost halved the time taken to pay NHS suppliers after moving to cloud-based business platform, Tradeshift, just over a year ago. Suppliers who use this platform are now paid in an average of 24 days instead of 42.

Orion Health announces global launch of Amadeus

Orion Health has launched Amadeus, a secure open-data platform that scales to aggregate and manage different types of health-related data. Orion Health has evolved its population health management platform to accommodate huge data file sizes, including genomic information. CEO Ian McCrae says Amadeus is at the forefront of precision medicine, which is enabled when, “all information unique to an individual is combined to identify preventative care and treatments which will be effective for them based on genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors.”

SAP does personalised medicine

SAP has announced the SAP Foundation for Health and the SAP Medical Research Insights solution. Built on the SAP HANA platform, the new solutions reveal the value of patient data, from biomedical data to electronic medical records to clinical trials. They facilitate data integration and provide real-time analysis and reporting that together lead to improved personalised medicine and patient care