Health Informatics Blog

BBC has an article covering the use of technology in hospitals. It comments on PACS, Speech Recognition, Touch Screens and Wifi:

As Britain’s National Health Service celebrates its 60th birthday, new digital technology is revolutionising old working methods in a drive for greater efficiency.

The National Health Service has come a long way since its inception.

An x-ray is an old fashioned photograph which takes time to develop and then exists as an artefact that has to be physically passed around to everyone who needs it.

But having an x-ray taken at the Countess of Chester hospital in the north west of England no longer involves any film or photographic chemicals.

Instead a machine scans the image straight into a central database and makes it instantly available on the radiology ward and across the hospital in the consultant’s office.

At this hospital the images are scrutinised by expert eyes on high-resolution screens and, while other hospitals are doing the same thing, in Chester they have gone one step further.

Link

Congratulations to Map of Medicine’s founders Owen Epstein and Mike Stein and their team:

Hearst Corporation today announced the acquisition of U.K.-based Map of Medicine, a leading provider of evidence-based health-care resources designed to help health practitioners make sound decisions by following accessible clinical information on a range of relevant medical issues. The announcement was made by Victor F. Ganzi, president & CEO, Hearst Corporation, and Richard P. Malloch, president of Hearst Business Media. Map of Medicine, formerly owned by Informa plc, will be managed in London as a separate operating unit (Map of Medicine, a UK limited company) of Hearst Business Media.

Read more on CNN Money

Sir Muir Gray on the Map of Medicine:

NHS Connecting for Health services that use the ‘Spine’ such as Choose and Book and GP2GP will be out of action for a planning maintenance period from 9-11 of Novemeber:

The agency said the upgrades did not represent a complete replacement of the Spine. “The exercise is solely an uplift of the database management hardware and software. The application code and functionality of the Spine remain unchanged. The change will be transparent to users,” said a spokesperson.

BT says the upgrade, which includes a refresh of the Spine software and hardware, is required in order to “enable a more automated, faster and surer failover process and continuing levels of quality support.”

Source: E-Health Insider

HL7 gets a new CTO, Accenture’s John Quinn.

Jay Parkinson, MD MPH - employs the latest communication technology to offer a new kind of primary care practice.

British Computer Society says ‘One Patient, One Record’ unrealistic.

Archives of Internal Medicine study says Electronic Health Records fail to boost patient care in routine doctor visits.

Microwave Bras designed to help detect breast cancer.

Company ditches telemedicine for online gambling, shifts operations to Ireland.

My new Health Informatics books have arrived. The first one I’m tackling is ‘The NHS IT Project’ by Sean Brennan.

This book is a great read so far. I particularly enjoyed the vignettes from the point of view of Patient, GP and Consultant. The idea of discovering each morning that yet another patient has been placed on a inappropriate ward on the far end of the hospital and marching the whole medical team down there for a quick check up rang very true. I also remembered a conversation with my registrar who told me not to expect electronic patient records in either of our lifetimes… How quickly things have changed! We now have the NHS NPfIT ‘appearing like an army out of the dark’ to quote the book.

The book goes on to describe the basic structure of the NHS and how the ‘legacy’ systems (many actually only recently introduced) formed the pre-NPfIT NHS IT landscape. Further explanation of the programme and it’s possible benefits and drawbacks are discussed in the latter sections of the book.

The style of writing makes this a very interesting book to read and is highly recommended for anyone interested in health IT projects. If you want to read a sample of the book check out the preview on Google Books.