Home Office consults on data access plans
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has indicated that there will be a further round of public consultation on controversial plans to extend public bodies’ access to communications logs. The UK Home Office is already consulting on how to “transpose” a European Union directive on retaining data generated by public communications networks into UK law. This consultation […]
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Health check highlights record keeping issues
The Healthcare Commission has once again identified record keeping as one of the weakest areas of NHS performance in its annual health check. CO9, which requires organisations to have a “systematic and planned approach to the management of records”, is identified as one of the core standards with the lowest rates of compliance in the […]
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OLM recruits councils to personalisation programme
OLM Group has announced that six local authorities have joined its personalisation partnership programme, which is designed to help councils promote the government’s personalisation agenda in adult social care. Sam Newman, personalisation programme director, said the first cohort of councils to join were: Wandsworth Council, Suffolk County Council, Devon County Council, Warwickshire County Council and […]
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EHTEL and EuroRec symposium
The focus of e-health is shifting from connecting systems to connecting people, a symposium ahead of this year’s World of Health IT conference will be told.
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Nicholson reinforces encryption message
NHS chief executive David Nicholson has asked NHS chief executives to check that their organisations are encrypting all removable data. In a letter to the NHS, Mr Nicholson asks chief executives to “conduct a review to ensure your organisation has fully implemented the policy that all removable data must be encrypted” and that it is […]
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DH looks at single urgent care number
The Department of Health has said that it will publish proposals for a single, national telephone number for urgent care later this year. Responding to this week’s Healthcare Commission report on emergency and urgent care, the DH said: “As announced in Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS, we are looking at the benefits of a […]
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Siemens wins €28m Korean contract
Siemens has announced that it has secured a €28m contract to equip eight Korean hospitals with medical systems, in what it claims is one of the biggest orders of its kind in the medical industry worldwide. The company will equip the radiology, nuclear medicine, oncology, cardiology and emergency departments of the eight hospitals that make […]
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Dutch study raises concern about phone triage
A study of out of hours services in the Netherlands has revealed shortcomings in the way patients are triaged. The study of 17 out of hours services, reported in the British Medical Journal, found that triagists tended to ask a limited number of questions and often failed to achieve the right clinical outcome. General practitioners […]
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Consent to view explored for detailed records
The new consent to view model for the NHS Summary Care Record in England may also be applied to the detailed care records held by NHS organisations. NHS Connecting for Health is to explore how the principle of ‘consent to view’ – announced as the new model for the SCR last week – could work […]
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E-prescribing round table report
The National Programme for IT in the NHS and hospital boards should put e-prescribing at the top of their agendas because of the huge patient safety benefits to be gained, a round-table discussion has concluded. The round table on e-prescribing, jointly organised by E-Health Insider and the British Computer Society’s Health Informatics Forum, brought together […]
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