Emerging technologies in CfH sights

Can RFID technology help prevent drug errors? Can patients’ bedside phone and entertainment terminals be used to give them better information? Can patients be better cared for in their homes?

These are some of the questions Connecting for Health (CfH) clinical architect, Dr Mike Bainbridge, will be looking at over the next two years as CfH examines emerging technologies and their applications in the NHS.

He asked delegates at the British Computer Society primary health care specialist group to be part of the developments. “It will be a grown up approach. We need to look at and learn from the experience we have had, especially in primary care, over the past 20 years. This is not something I can do in a monolithic fashion without bringing you and the public and suppliers along,” he said.

Dr Bainbridge revealed that he was also talking to manufacturers about his concerns that PDA screens were too small to display drug information well. Here, the benefits of working for a national agency became clear as he pointed out that suppliers are not interested in a lone comment about a small screen – but become very interested in a discussion with a potential purchaser of 500,000 devices.

He also spoke about ongoing work on the common user interface (CUI) being developed with Microsoft. The aim was to produce the safest and best interface for health, he said.

“If there are safe ways of representing things we will try to achieve that where possible, for example with an unambiguous date format,” he said.

The CUI also has the potential to less the burden of training on the NHS and thus increase return on investment. The focus, Dr Bainbridge said, would be on safety and clinical utility.

Other work with Microsoft is looking at the Office suite of applications. Release One of the developments will make available a medical spell checker and integrated access to research from the National Library for Health.