First chief clinical officer appointed by CfH
Professor Michael Thick has been appointed as Connecting for Health’s first chief clinical officer. The new chief clinical officer, who takes up his post with immediate effect, will be responsible for clinical governance and risk and safety management, and according to the agency will be "key to engaging stakeholders in the work of NHS CfH." […]
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Doctors test out RFID system for handovers
Doctors at the Birmingham’s Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust are testing the use of RFID technology for patient handovers. David Morgan, consultant ENT surgeon at the trust, who is also surgical safety adviser to the National Patient Safety Agency, explained the system to the Clinical Care Computing conference in London last week. Birmingham Heartlands […]
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Patient safety becomes priority for NHS IT
The NHS National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) has worked with Connecting for Health to build a rigorous system of safety checks which may, if necessary, delay product release, a conference has heard. Clive Flashman, head of the national learning and reporting system at the NPSA, outlined extensive work done to a conference in London this […]
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Sealed envelope safety risk raised by BMA
Doctors have raised concerns that Connecting for Health proposals to allow patients to hide some information in sealed envelopes puts patient safety at risk. Representatives at the British Medical Association’s annual meeting backed a motion which claimed that allowing patients to keep some medical information confidential from other doctors “may lead to significant patient safety […]
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Anti-fraud software extended to all NHS acute trusts
A pilot scheme that detected nearly £1m of duplicate and fraudulent payments by the public sector has been extended to include all NHS acute trusts. The Audit Commission’s creditor data matching exercise, in which NHS and local authority records are matched against each other and records from Companies House with the results fed back to trusts […]
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City Hospitals Sunderland rolls out e-prescribing
City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust has rolled out electronic prescribing throughout inpatient areas of the trust. The project required the specification and development of a new module by US vendor, Meditech, which has been extensively anglicised for the UK, plus a programme of business change by clinical staff. David Miller, business manager for pharmacy at […]
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PACS underway in half of English trusts
Around half of trusts in England either have a picture archiving and communications system “happening, about to happen or happened”, the UK Radiological Congress in Birmingham heard this week National clinical lead for radiological imaging, Dr Erika Denton, said 63 business cases were approved out of a total of 134, 50 purchase orders had been […]
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Victoria signs with Cerner
Australia’s state of Victoria has selected Cerner as its latest healthcare IT partner. The value of the deal was not disclosed. Under an agreement signed with the Victorian Department of Human Service’s Cerner will provide the company’s Millennium clinical IT solutions to public hospitals and clinics across Australia’s most populous state. In January iSoft was awarded […]
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Academics call for NPfIT technical assessment
A group of 23 computer science academics from around the UK have written an open letter calling for an “independent technical assessment” of the National Programme for IT. They say in their letter to the House of Commons health select committee: "Concrete, objective information about NPfIT’s [National Programme for IT] progress is not available to external […]
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Space programme
One of the most intriguing aspects of the NHS IT programme is the HealthSpace project, the online patient portal. Daloni Carlisle reports on how the patient access project is progressing.
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