Brown plays a safe hand with electronic scripts
The chancellor Gordon Brown has called for more electronic prescriptions to be issued in the NHS, as part of his campaign to be the next leader of the Labour Party. Brown, the favourite to win the leadership contest, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday that there needed to be “more electronic prescriptions so […]
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Ten new CBT pilots will include online therapy
Health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, has announced that the government is investing £2m on a further ten pathfinder projects into Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which will include computerised therapy for patient suffering from anxiety and depression. Hewitt announced the extension of the pilot schemes at the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies conference in London yesterday and the […]
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PAC report reveals postcode lottery on GP systems
Connecting for Health has treated contracts for GP systems differently in its five clusters with local service providers contracted to supply GP systems to all practices in three clusters while there is no such agreement in the other two clusters. The different contractual arrangements around the country are revealed in print for the first time […]
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Guidance on computerised CBT launched
New implementation guidance for the use of computerised cognitive behavioural therapy (cCBT) for mild mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety has been launched by the Department of Health. The guidance is being released following the success of two demonstration sites in Doncaster and Newham, set up last May, which found that facilitating patients […]
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First GP2GP records transferred between different systems
The first GP2GP record transfers between different GP computer systems has taken place, health minister Lord Hunt has announced. The transfers, between practices using EMIS and INPS’s Vision system, took place over the last two weeks as part of Connecting for Health’s trial of interoperable record transfers at Croydon Primary Care Trust. The successful transfers […]
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EMIS becomes first GP supplier to commit to CUI
Primary care systems supplier EMIS is to become the first major clinical software vendor to the health service to incorporate elements of the new NHS Common User Interface (CUI), developed by Microsoft on behalf of Connecting for Health, into its software. EMIS revealed to EHI Primary Care last week that it will incorporate components of […]
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Exercising Choice
When Connecting for Health appointed its GP clinical leads two years ago, there were three big issues on the primary care IT agenda: consent and confidentiality, Choose and Book and systems choice.
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Electronic hospital discharge summary rolls out
Gloucestershire hospitals have come up with an answer to the age-old problem of getting discharge information over to GPs quickly when a patient goes home. The hospitals’ newly-installed Info-flex system from Chameleon Information Management Services (CIMS) collects the relevant clinical data and produces a discharge summary. The summary is sent electronically via the Anglia Healthcare messaging […]
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NHS Direct Wales launch new website
NHS Direct Wales have launched a new website, after research indicated that two-thirds of the country use the internet for health information. The new website, www.nhsdirect.wales.nhs.uk, was launched last Thursday to give patients and public more information to make decisions about their own health and care. It was developed by the information service in partnership […]
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EPS tops 10m prescription mark
More than 10 million electronic prescription messages have now been transmitted using the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS), NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) has announced. Latest figures from CfH show that 10,061,362 messages had been transmitted by 9 January as part of release one of the EPS project which allows pharmacists to scan prescription details into […]
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