CfH looking for PCTs to trial summary record
NHS Connecting for Health is looking for primary care trusts to become early adopters for the NHS Care Records Service summary record. The agency wrote to all PCTs last week seeking expressions of interest to be early adopter sites, which it says will assess “several key concepts” associated with the summary record. These include the implied consent model […]
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Bedford Hospital gets remote access
Scalable Networks, a provider of secure network solutions, has announced the completion of a remote access solution for up to 1,500 staff Bedford Hospital NHS Trust. The first phase of the remote access system has already been rolled out to clinical staff, including pharmacists and radiologists at the hospital. The remote access solution should be […]
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Sage moves into healthcare IT market
The UK’s largest technology company and supplier of accounting software, Sage, has announced the purchase of Florida-based Emdeon Practice Services for £297m with a view to setting up a new division for healthcare software. Kevin Cameron, chief executive officer of Emdeon, said: "We are very please to announce today’s transaction with Sage… We are also […]
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Survey says practices not receiving activity data for PBC
Almost 70% of GP practices have received only partial or no activity data from their primary care trust to take on practice-based commissioning, according to a survey conducted by the Improvement Foundation. The survey of 395 practices across England found that 11 per cent of practices have received no activity data from their PCT and […]
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Leicestershire PCTs saving approx £2m from clinical IT
Health software supplier Ethitec has calculated that the six primary care trusts in Leicestershire are making efficiency savings worth the equivalent of £2m a year through their use of its Tiara9 clinical information system for allied health professions. The savings are extrapolated from data taken from the clinical information system based on reduced numbers of […]
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IBM donates code to open source health project
IBM has donated code to the Eclipse.org foundation’s Open Healthcare Framework (OHF), which works on increasing interoperability of healthcare software so that software vendors to easily develop applications that exchange data reliably and securely. The OHF aims to deliver an open source data sharing platform based on standards such as HL7 and Integrating the Healthcare […]
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Strike action threat over NHS Direct cuts
Unison and the Royal College of Nursing are warning they may consider strike action after a consultation into staff cuts at NHS Direct is complete. NHS Direct launched a three-month consultation in May 2006 on proposals to cut capacity due to the service picking up fewer GP Out of Hours contracts than it had […]
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MP calls for clarity on payments to iSoft
Following yesterday’s suspension of iSoft co-founder, Steve Graham, pending investigation of possible accounting irregularities, Richard Bacon MP, has called for the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to confirm whether advance payments were made to iSoft under the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT). The Conservative MP, a leading member of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee […]
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DH to survey Electronic Social Care Record progress
The Department of Health (DH) is to carry out a survey on how the Electronic Social Care Record (ESCR) is developing around the country. The survey, carried out on behalf of the DH’s ESCR Implementation Group, will aim to see what progress is being made by local authorities and form the basis of further work […]
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EU project looks at DNA link to patient records
A telemedicine project funded by the European Union has been looking at ways of matching patients in emergency situations with their electronic records using their DNA. The DICOEMS project was set up to help integrate healthcare databases through means of a grid system, with a view to making more information available for paramedics and in […]
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