Prime minister Boris Johnson made his third televised address of the Covid-19 emergency and urged people to abide by new restrictions to control the disease as positive tests and deaths increased. Chancellor Rishi Sunak made a statement to try and protect jobs over the winter, but the Treasury confirmed there would be no Budget this year – a problem for the NHS that is running on ever shorter-term funding.
England finally released its Covid-19 app, with contact tracing functionality alongside a venue check-in scanner and a local risk assessor. And the winners of the third wave of e-prescribing funding were announced.
There were worrying signs that Covid-19 cases were on the rise as England’s testing system all but collapsed. NHS England issued its financial allocations for the rest of the year, focused on systems rather than internal market mechanisms, and on delivering elective activity.
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust became the first hospital in Europe to reach Level 7 on the HIMSS EMRAM maturity model, using Epic. Oxehealth announced it is working with two of England’s leading mental health trusts and Hospify launched a Web App version of its communications service. Plus: Find out how our judges picked their #HealthTechToShoutAbout shortlist for the Health Tech Awards 2020.
Both the English and Scottish governments announced new restrictions on social gatherings as coronavirus infection rates ticked up again. Scotland launched a contact tracing app. England didn’t. To underline the challenges that UK health systems could face this winter, the number of people on waiting lists hit record highs.
In a quiet week for health tech news, the NHSX NHS AI Lab unveiled 42 projects that it will develop, evaluate, test or try and get adopted in the NHS. And Orion Health was listed on the Spark framework for cutting edge technology, for its Remote Patient Monitoring solution.
Healthcare Roundup 25 September 2020