Heartlands uses RFID for patient identification
The Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust has awarded Safe Surgery Systems Ltd a contract to supply a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) patient identification system that links to electronic patient records on PDAs, allowing staff to identify patients before they go for surgery. Hear of England will use wireless PDA’s and patient wristbands fitted with […]
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Euroking’s new maternity goes live at Heart of England
Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust has become the first hospital trust to go live with EuroKing Miracle’s E3 third generation Maternity Information System. The foundation trust, which is one of the largest in the UK, went live with the upgrade to the Miracle MIS at its two major sites, Birmingham Heartlands and Solihull Hospitals, […]
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NPSA issues spec for electronic blood tracking
The National Patient Safety Agency has unveiled new measures to help improve the safety of blood transfusions, including the initial specification for an electronic tracking system to ensure the right patient is matched with the right blood product. The NPSA has worked with Serious Hazards of Transfusion (SHOT) and the Chief Medical Officer’s National Blood […]
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Border control
Neil Versel finds out what barriers still need to be overcome before electronic health record sharing becomes common between European countries.
Feature
Europe’s citizens must be engaged on e-health
Efforts to increase the levels of ICT in healthcare will not succeed if average citizens are not involved in discourse about e-health policy, a key group of European informatics professionals is cautioning. The European Health Telematics Associatiuon (EHTEL) issued a paper and companion documents on patient safety and electronic health records at the first-ever World of Health […]
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Smart sponges to reduce surgical accidents in US
A new barcode system used on surgical sponges will be trialled by the Veterans’ Administration West Los Angeles Health Care Centre this month to improve patient safety. The system is designed to prevent used sponges being left in patients after surgical operations. The developers of the smart sponge say it has the potential to prevent thousands […]
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London Ambulance computer crashes nine times
London Ambulance Service 999 emergency operators have been forced to manually write down emergency details and alert paramedics by radio, due to their computer system crashing nine times in the last fortnight. The system is supposed to feed emergency calls into a computer, and automatically alert the nearest ambulance. However an unspecified technical problem has […]
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NI to link barcodes on prescriptions to EPRs
The Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety in Northern Ireland has announced it has signed a £6.8m contract with Hewlett Packard to provide it with bar-coded prescriptions in an effort to counter fraud. The new Electronic Prescribing and Eligibility System (EPES) will be rolled out over the next two years. Paper prescriptions will […]
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CfH seeks acute trust for blood barcoding pilot
NHS Connecting for Health and the National Patient Safety Agency have announced they are looking for an acute trust to pilot IT specifications for electronic blood tracking. A small, non-teaching hospital trust is sought for the pilot, which will begin in March 2007, to evaluate the IT guidelines developed by the NPSA. The NPSA’s aim […]
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Trusts urged to move faster with e-prescribing
Trusts are being urged to move forward faster with e-prescribing and the use of robotics to automate hospital pharmacies by the leader of the Healthcare Commission’s medicines management review. Review lead, Julia Sonander, was speaking to E-Health Insider following publication of comparative assessments on medicines management for all 173 acute hospital trusts in England. Eighteen hospital […]
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