The debate over the degree of regulation needed for healthcare apps flared into life again this week when the Royal College of Physicians issued guidance suggesting that doctors should only use apps that could be classed as medical devices if they carry a CE mark.

Some EHI News commenters have welcomed the move, saying it’s time some rigour was brought to the field, and a CE mark will give good developers a competitive advantage. Others have pointed out that paper-based and even enterprise systems have rarely been subjected to this kind of scrutiny, that CE marking will cost time and money that developers may not be able to afford, and the guidance may prove impossible to police. Join in using the comment button.

One app that has got a CE mark is the Mersey Burns app that won the EHI Awards 2013. If you want to enter this year’s awards, run by Informa, then it might be a good idea to spend the bank holiday getting an entry together – the closing date is next Friday, 8 May.

Meanwhile, look out for some changes to the EHI News website over the weekend. EHI News is becoming Digital Health News, and will be moving to a new domain – digitalhealth.net. For the next six months, anyone visiting the old ehi.co.uk domain will be taken to a landing page, asking if they want to proceed to digitalhealth.net. If you want news, jobs, Intelligence or the CCIO and Health CIO networks, then that is what you want to do. Please bookmark us now.

Consortium saves £110m on EPR costs

A consortium of 38 trusts in London and the South has saved £110m by moving to individual contracts with electronic patient record suppliers.

Two RiO trusts to switch EPR

Two RiO trusts in London and the south have chosen to move to new electronic patient record system suppliers before the end of their national contracts this October.

United Lincolnshire upgrades Medway

United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust will upgrade to a new version of System C’s Medway patient administration system following a series of issues with the system.

Medical apps need CE mark - RCP

Doctors should only use medical apps with an official CE mark, new guidance from the Royal College of Physicians says.

NHS Choices aims to aggregate

NHS Choices plans to become an aggregator platform for a more integrated system of NHS services, its head of business development has said.

Threat to hurl tablets into canal

Clinicians at a central London trust threatened to throw their tablet computers in a canal before confidence was built in adopting mobile working, an electronic patient record clinical lead has said.

Robots live in new super hospital

Glasgow’s new £842 million super hospital opened its doors this week with 26 robot porters operating in the basement.

So, paperless. Cracking idea. Allows organisations to scrap all that ink on dead tree that is difficult to co-ordinate, transport and use, in favour of applications on mobile devices that can be centrally updated, are light and easy to search. So American Airlines, at least, thought when it became the first commercial airline to junk the “35 pounds of paper-based reference material” that its pilots had to lug around in favour of manuals on tablet computers.

At the time, one of its vice presidents told the relevant trade press that the move would save 24 million pages of paper and 400,000 gallons of fuel costing $1.2 million every year. Unfortunately, of course, you then don’t want anything to go wrong. You don’t want the app to crash and the tablets to power down, for instance. As happened this week. Grounding a number of aircraft…

“I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Overlords.”

“If you look at something like Tinder… if that’s the way we’re going to choose our politicians then I think there is a role for standing on someone’s doorstep and chatting to them the old-fashioned way.”

Jeremy Hunt expresses some doubt about new fangled digital innovation at the end of the general election campaign.