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Digital Healthcare – Making the most of NHS IPR

I’ve got what I think is an important question for NHS England. How do we get the best value out of the IPR (intellectual property rights) created by NHS organisations developing digital tools – Is it by freely sharing this IPR or by seeking to exploit it commercially? Encouraging innovation, and more importantly getting it…

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Electronic Health Records

This blog is the first of a series of extracts from a long paper on Electronic Health Records that I have been maintaining and revising since 2008. It’s been shared on a limited basis and has benefit from review and input by a number of individuals,  particularly fellow members of the BCS Primary Health Care Specailists Group…

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Time for Zero-Tolerance

I heard the blindingly obvious statement at the recent Intellect stream of BCS HC2013 Conference in Birmingham that “If you give people software that makes their life easier then adoption is not a problem” Given the clear truth of this statement, I wonder why so many “designing” and procuring NHS IT Systems manage to deliver…

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Healthcare and Banking

NHS leaders often make comparisons between the use of IT and digital service in banking and health. While we have much to learn from other sectors I feel this comparison means that those who make it don’t fully understand the challenge. What banking systems do is fundamentally very simple – They move money (unambiguously and simply represented by a…

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Preserving Trust in the Digital Age

Trust lies at the heart of the relationship between patients and those that care for them. Meeting the challenges faced by the health care system requires that we make much greater use of digital technology and increasing sophisticated use of information, but in doing so we need to ensure we preserve trust. Healthcare professionals have…

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The power of information and digital technology to transform the NHS

I believe passionately in the power of information and digital technology to transform the way we deliver health and care, indeed I consider it essential if we are the meet the growing demands the health and care system faces within the resources likely to be available. We need to mobilise information to help us redesign…

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A Paperless NHS

Given the usual scant regard to the commonly accepted meaning of words that seems to be the norm in the NHS – “Paperless” is something that we now have in the majority of general practices and that many have had for some years and I’m really enthusiastic about the desire from the centre to drag the rest…

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Patient record access – A spur to innovation

I’ve been involved in one of the working groups which are part of the RCGP-Led Online Patient Access Project,  which has been funded by DH to help deliver on the Government’s promise to deliver online access for all to their GP records and a range of associated transactional services by 2015. As part of this…

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VistA for the NHS

Ewan Davis – Director of Woodcote Consulting shares his thoughts on VistA VistA is the open source electronic health record (EHR) system developed and used in the American Veteran’s Health Administration (VA). It is widely acknowledged that over recent years the VA has transformed itself from one of the worst healthcare provider to probably the best in the USA with its use…

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