Healthcare IT industry news in brief

This week’s round-up of healthcare IT industry news includes an update on a big RFID asset tracking project in Milton Keynes, news of another London trust joining Coordinate My Care, the development of an offline access system for health visitors in the Western Isles, and company trading updates.

Milton Keynes Hospital uses RFID asset tracking

Milton Keynes Hospital has reduced the amount of time that its clinical and engineering staff spend looking for medical devices by using Radio Frequency Identification technology from Harland Simon. The 500 bed district general hospital first started using RFID Discovery in 2012, when 500 active RFID tags were purchased for mobile devices held by the medical equipment library. Since then, 1,800 devices have been tagged for tracking by 22 fixed and two mobile readers. The installation of more readers is planned so more audits can be carried out automatically.

Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust connects to ‘Coordinate My Care’

InterSystems has announced that Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has connected to Coordinate My Care, a clinical service providing digital, personalised, urgent care plans. This means Hillingdon care providers are now automatically alerted, via the trust’s mobile digital care record, if a patient has a CMC urgent care plan in place. The CMC service is hosted by the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and built on the InterSystems HealthShare platform. It makes sure that care plans are shared with GPs, community nurses, the ambulance service, hospices and similar providers. So far, 25,000 care plans have been put in place.

Cambric Systems develops offline solution for the Western Isles

Cambric Systems, a Scottish software company has come up with an innovative software solution to enable health visitors in the Western Isles to access information while out in the community and visiting patients. The software enables data to be recorded offline, changed, and then synced back to a main computer system when an internet connection becomes available. Cambric has called the software Morse. It has gone through six months of piloting and four release phases, and will be made available to other users.

iMDSoft updates on growth

iMDSoft has announced that its MetaVision clinical information system was implemented in more than 45 anaesthesia and critical care units across the world over the past 12 months. These implementations included a go-live at Southampton’s University Hospital, which is using MetaVision on 100 anaesthesia and ICU beds and for mobile electronic observations on general wards. They also include the company’s first implementations in the Czech Republic.

Emis Group trading update

Emis Group has issued a trading update saying it continues to grow both organically and by acquiring new business. The update covers 2015, the first year after the roll-out of Emis Web, which the company says has given it a UK market share of 55%. The update also says the group has picked up seven child community and mental health contracts with the end of the National Programme for IT; that it is piloting a new community pharmacy system in Wales, that it resigned its contract with the Ministry of Defence; but that it has won fewer contracts in secondary care than expected.  

Sophos releases survey on IT security in the NHS

Sophos has issued a survey on IT security in the NHS. The research, conducted by Vanson Bourne among 250 IT leaders, found that 76% believed they were protected against cybercrime and that 72% identified data loss as their biggest problem. More than 80% said encryption was becoming a necessity, but the percentages saying that their organisation had email, file share, and cloud encryption were much lower, at 59%, 48% and 34%. Sophos commentary says this suggests there is a gap between perception and reality when it comes to NHS IT, and that there are gaps to be filled.