Healthcare IT news in brief

This week’s round-up of HealthIT news is a little NHS Digital centric, with a regional shake-up of the organisation and some well-deserved recognition for one of its established leaders.

Beverley Bryant named ‘digital leader of the year’

NHS Digital’s digital transformation director has been named “digital leader of the year” at the Women in IT awards.

The awards were held at Grosvenor House, London, on 26 January, with Bryant the only person  in healthcare winning one of the top prizes. Other winners included leaders from Shell, Intel and the University of London.

Bryant has been a digital leader in the NHS for many years, but moved from NHS England to NHS Digital to become digital transformation director last year.

She was previously digital technology director at NHS England and took many of her digital delivery responsibilities with her to NHS Digital.

At NHS England, she was heavily involved in promoting local digital roadmaps, code4health, and the ‘digital challenge fund’ to improve uptake of electronic patient records and e-prescribing.

In December, Bryant told Digital Health News that her big priorities for 2017 were improving interoperability and GP connect.

Health charity picks IMS Maxims

Horder Healthcare has picked IMS Maxims to supply a new electronic patient record across its five sites in South West England.

The non-NHS health charity operates two hospitals and three clinics, employing 350 staff including a range of consultant specialists and physiotherapists. It also runs exercise classed.

IMS Maxims EPR will replace a mostly paper-based system, creating a single record across the organisation. As well as a ten-year contract covering the EPR, Horder will be using and CommonMS, a IMS Maxims partner supplier, for its billing and accounting systems.

Regional shake-up for NHS Digital

NHS Digital will split further into four regional teams in line with similar moves at NHS England and NHS Improvement.

In its ‘Implementation and Business Change’ plans, headcount at NHS Digital will increase slightly from 113 to 115, but shift among the regions. The north and south regions will both lose staff, while London and the Midlands will gain staff. The new structure is being described as “one team across four regions”.

The move is designed to increase digital support for new regional organisational structures based around the local digital roadmaps and sustainability and transformation plans. Regional interoperability is also expected to be a big focus.

NHS Digital’s digital transformation director, Beverley Bryant, is leading the project.

North Cumbria picks Silverlink

In non-NHS Digital news, North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust went live with Silverlink patient administration system after a two-year long data migration process of 500,000 patient records. In November last year the trust, assisted by healthcare data specialist, Stalis, using the CareXML platform, moved twenty years of data to Silverlink.

 NHS Digital picks new non-executive board members

Back to NHS Digital, which has also appointed five new non-executive board members, each which have new responsibilities over areas of the organisation.

The group includes senior leaders from the tech industry, local government, academia and, of course, the NHS. It doubles the number of non-executive board members from five to ten.

The new non-executive directors are: Soraya Dhillon, a clinical academic, Sudhesh Kumar, clinician and director at the Institute of Digital Healthcare at Warwick University, Marko Balabanovic, CTO at Digital Catapult, senior tech leader Daniel Benton, and Rob Tinlin, chief executive at Southend-on-Sea Council.

Fresh funding for Southhampton personal health record

The University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust has received a £75,000 Health Foundation grant to help expand its ‘my medical record’ project.

My medical record is personal health record website that allows patient to “co-manage” their health information, including managing bookings, online consultations. The Health Foundation money will be used to trialled the site for patients with inflammatory bowel disease, and allows them to see some of their health record from home.

Kevin Hamer, programme manager for my medical record, said: "This funding will enable us to begin rolling out this system in a non-cancer setting to enable patients with inflammatory bowel disease to benefit from supported self-management.”