Archive for March 2011

Everything you wanted to know about GP Consortia IT

I organised what I think was the first national GP computing exhibition in 1981 for the GP Computer Suppliers Association  (now part of Intellect) it was a sell out and I have been trying to organise another sell out event  without success ever since. However, with the BCS Primary Health Info Conference I am helping…

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King's Fund Inquiry

The King’s Fund Report on their inquiry into the quality of general practice “Improving the quality of care in general practice”  www.kingsfund.org.uk/current_projects/gp_inquiry is worth a read by anybody interested in UK healthcare. Even if it does manage to get the date of foundation of the RCGP wrong by 20 years (page 14) – it was…

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EPS and the Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions

I first worked on the forerunner of what we now call EPS (the Electronic Prescription Service) in 1986, when I wrote an evaluation of a project to using a memory card to transfer prescriptions from GP practices to pharmacy for the then DHSS. However, even this was not quite the beginning of the EPS story…

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Life without a Moblie Phone

Both my adult children have recently had their phones stolen. Both were bereft. This lead to the following email to my son with some reflections on life without a mobile phone. Hi Silas, How are you finding life without a phone? Interesting to reflect on this. You were born in to a world where very…

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English GP Systems Market

I’ve been looking at some statistics on the GP market in England which may be of interest. Recent years have seen a considerable consolidation in the market and although there were never the number of suppliers that some of the literature suggests (The peak was probably about 40 suppliers who had sold at least one…

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Tonsillitis Pen V

What you might have seen in a GP record circa 1980, if you could have read the handwriting! Early GP computing was fighting the hardware. How could we get 6000 patient records on a  pair of 8 inch floppy disks (well under 1Mb)?  The terse style of GP records gave us a chance, particularly if…

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Dr Finlay’s Facebook?

The marvellous phrase comes from the Demos publication “the talking cure why conversation is the future of healthcare”  by Jack Stilgoe and Faizal Farook http://bit.ly/e0GUAD They use it to describe the changing relationship between internet enable patients and doctors. I have stolen it as shorthand for a new online environment that I think we need…

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Medication Concordance

I’ve been doing some work concerned with patient concordance with medication in UK General Practice and have just completed a quick trawl through the literature. I knew that patient concordance was not good, but what I see is truly worrying with data showing that  only about 40% are still taking the prescribed medication after 3…

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