E-Health Insider’s industry news round up for the week ending 06 June 2008 featuring supplier news, awards and information on newly published research reports.

Supplier news 

Barts and the London School uses TurningPoint interactive assessments

Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry has announced that it has chosen Turning Technologies interactive assessment tool, TurningPoint, to improve learning outcomes of its medical students. Dr Patricia Revest, a course leader at the school, said: “Our students benefit from an innovative curricula taught by internationally renowned staff. We chose TurningPoint to help both lecturers and students assess how well a concept has been understood.”

Northampton choose Fujitsu Siemens Computers data centre

Fujitsu Siemens Computers and its healthcare partner Tracline have been chosen by Northampton General Hospital http://www.northamptongeneral.nhs.uk/ to deliver a comprehensive data centre system. Tracline will provide a solution based on Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMERGY servers, NetApp storage and VMware as part of a project to reduce energy consumption and improve productivity by reducing time spent on activities such as back-up.

Agfa HealthCare reaches 100m PACS images

A presentation was held last month to mark the occasion of the capture of the 100 millionth Agfa HealthCare PACS study across the PACS North East and East and East Midlands Clusters. Tracey Morris, account manager of Agfa HealthCare presented John Somers, consultant radiologist at Queens Medical Centre, with a commemorative plaque. The study was captured by QMC part of the Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust in December 2007 and marked a huge milestone in the nationwide switch from X-ray film to digital image capture.

Carelink to provide trusts with content management systems

Carelink, the health division of ioko, and provider of IT services to over 240 NHS clients and other healthcare-related organisations, is to deploy the latest version of Core Site, the leading website solution for the NHS, to four additional NHS Trusts: Mid Essex PCT, Lincolnshire Teaching PCT, Telford & Wrekin PCT and Norfolk & Waveney Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. Core Site II is based on the very latest technology from EPiServer, specialists in content management systems.

Dental faculties team up for e-learning

The four dental faculties of the Royal Colleges in England, Edinburgh and Glasgow have got together to provide an e-learning service to dentists in training. The project will encompass dentistry’s general professional training foundation curriculum and is funded by the Department of Health. The program will be available UK-wide and is free to all NHS trainees and anyone with an NHS contract.

Podcast of London e-learning event available online

A podcast of a Course-Source event dedicated to developing e-learning in the health sector, held at the Royal Society of Medicine, is now available at www.course-source.net/events. The event was the second in a series aiming to support health sector professionals explore the technology and benefits of online learning. It focused on rapid design, development and delivery and highlighted the benefits of the new HealthELearning.net portal launched by Course-Source earlier this year. The next Course-Source health sector event is to be held in Manchester on July 7th 2008

Awards

Entries open for BT e-Health Insider Awards 2008

New categories in the BT e-Health Insider Awards 2008 will reward excellent work by healthcare information and communications technology professionals in vital areas such as patient safety, security and wireless working. Details of the awards and online entry forms are at: www.ehealthawards.com.

Research Reports

EHI publishes new report focusing on web 2.0

Internet developments that brought us sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia are now set to revolutionise healthcare, according to a new research report from E-Health Insider. Titled ‘Web 2.0 in the Health Sector: Industry Review with a UK perspective’ the report concludes that new applications based on social health networks and content generated by health service users themselves will rapidly evolve to challenge existing healthcare systems and create new ways of delivering our healthcare. An executive summary of the ‘Web 2.0 in the Health Sector: Industry Review with UK Perspective’ report is available here