News in brief
- UK sets up four e-health research centres: A new UK e-health project has been set up with the aim of identifying more effective treatments for conditions such as diabetes and cancer by combining clinical, social and research data from electronic health records. The research centres based in London, Manchester, Dundee and Swansea will use patient data sets available through the government’s new £60m Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD). The e-health centres, which are the first of their kind are to be funded by a consortium of 10 UK government and charity backers, including the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust and will open later this year.
- Southern group hopes for ‘quantum leap’: Three Southern trusts are preparing a business case to make a “quantum leap” to a full electronic patient record to include: PAS+, e-prescribing, pharmacy/stock control, clinical documentation, order communications, clinical portal, theatres, A&E, and maternity systems reports EHI. Gloucestershire Hospitals, Northern Devon Healthcare and Yeovil District Hospital together form one of six collaborations involving 21 Southern acute trusts, formed to invest in a variety of new IT systems. Having got nothing from the NPfIT, the trusts are hoping to secure central funding for the systems. Each group is working on a business case to present to the Southern programme board next month, before going before the Cabinet Office for approval.
- Allocate Software acquires RealTime: RealTime Health, a supplier of patient flow software has been acquired by Allocate Software. RealTime Health’s software can be used to improve clinical processes, leading to reduced length of stay, as well as improvements in the quality of care and financial performance. A statement from Allocate Software says its acquisition will give its NHS customers the option to work with a single software supplier to manage clinical activity, patient flow and bed management, alongside workforce management, governance and compliance.
- Southern community tender issued: A £28m community and child health systems procurement which is for community providers covered by the Additional Supply Capability and Capacity procurement programme is out to tender, reports EHI. It is expected to lead to nine Southern trusts receiving one system as a managed service. Each contract term will be four years with the possibility to extend this for up to two further periods of 18 months each. Tad Matus, who is chief information officer for NHS South East Coast, said the plan is to have contracts signed shortly after Christmas.
- New online tool to search and compare local care providers: The Provider Quality Profile has been launched as part of the ‘Caring for our future’ White Paper. It allows users to search and compare any Care Quality Commission (CQC) registered home care, residential or nursing home provider and is now available online at NHS Choices. The service is being extended so providers can include key information about themselves such as photographs of rooms, pictures of staff along with short biographies, information on services, visiting arrangements, pets and visiting clergy in order to help care providers deliver better quality services and to improve the care that people experience.
- Bed waiting times soar for A&E admissions: According to an analysis carried out by HSJ (subscription required) the number of patients waiting more than four hours in emergency departments for a bed to become available has rocketed in the past year. In the first six months of 2012, 66,845 patients waited between four and 12 hours for a bed once a decision had been taken to admit them, according to Department of Health (DH) data. This is up from 50,944 in the same period the previous year – a 31 percent rise. The main A&E performance measure currently used by the DH and Monitor requires trusts to admit or discharge 95 percent of A&E patients within four hours.
- NW consortium picks Carestream PACS: The Cheshire and Merseyside Consortium, which covers 11 trusts, has chosen Carestream to supply its picture archiving and communications system. The original tender estimated to be worth between £5-10m has awarded Carestream “preferred bidder status” for the contract. Charlie McCaffrey, managing director of Carestream UK, said: “We have a great reputation for service in the North West of England and this is our chance to extend the high quality support that our customers expect for this PACS implementation.”
- Fit notes finally go electronic: Computer-generated “fit notes” are being rolled out to GPs by clinical systems suppliers from this month, starting with EMIS practices, reports EHI. At the moment, medical certificates have to be hand written by GPs. However, following a successful trial, EMIS is rolling out electronic medical certificate software across all three of its systems – EMIS Web, PCS and LV. This will allow GPs to automatically generate, record and print Med3 certificates for patients.
- Jury in FSA’s iSOFT trial fail to return a verdict: The Financial Services Authority’s case against three former company directors at software firm iSOFT is set to go to retrial after the jury at Southwark Crown Court failed to reach a verdict. Timothy Whiston, John Whelan and Stephen Graham are accused of putting revenue on the company’s books from a £44m deal to provide a new computer system to the Irish health service in 2003 even though the contract was not signed until April 2005. The four-month long trial, which has cost the taxpayer millions, featured former trade minister Lord Digby Jones. All the men deny the charges.
- NHS Trust fined £175,000 for ‘entirely avoidable’ data breach: The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined Torbay Care Trust (TCT) £175,000 for a data breach it said was “entirely avoidable”. The trust published “sensitive details” of over 1,000 employees on its website in April 2011 which comprised the equality and diversity responses of 1,373 staff, and included individuals’ names, dates of birth and National Insurance numbers, as well information about religion and sexuality. The ICO said that its investigation found that TCT issued no guidance to staff on the information that should not be published online and did not have the necessary checks in place to identify potential problems.
- New report promises ‘painless’ NHS reform: The BMA says its own set of guidelines and recommendations could help lead the integration of NHS services without the need for major structural or organisational change. A new practical toolkit “Integrating Services Without Structural Change” considers how doctors can work to integrate health and social care, and different parts of the NHS “virtually”. The report by BMA policy analyst Sally Al-Zaidy and published by the BMA health policy and economic research unit, is one of a series on integrated care. It says doctors can play a key role in improving communication and relationships and that healthcare integration should not be looked at on its own, but as a vital part of wider healthcare policy.
- Roper Industries buys Sunquest: Sunquest Information Systems, which supplies order communications and other lab messaging software to GPs and NHS trusts, has been bought by Roper Industries, reports EHI. Paying $1.4 billion for Sunquest, in a statement on its website, Roper says it expects the acquisition to be “immediately cash accretive” to the tune of $140m in the coming year. Brian Jellison, Roper’s chairman, president and chief executive, said: “We expect Sunquest to benefit in all economic environments from very favourable market forces – an aging population, expansion of anatomic pathology and the need for reduced healthcare costs and improved quality of care.” Sunquest will continue to operate under its existing name and brand.
- North Staffordshire trust fined again over waiting time failures: University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS Trust has been fined £2.5m by commissioners for its continued failure to hit a key A&E target reports HSJ (subscription required). The £420m turnover trust failed to meet the 95 percent target for four-hour waits in A&E every week from the start of the financial year up to 8th July. In the past month one patient was kept on an A&E trolley for 19 hours while two more patients waited for at least 12 hours. The hospital has said the A&E department was seeing an average of 320 people a day since the start of the year – 50 more than in 2011. Despite the poor performance at the start of the financial year the trust is now hitting the target, reporting a performance of 97 percent or more in the last three weeks of July.
- Pension funds to bankroll £298m hospital in finance first: Two pension funds have offered to finance North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust’s new hospital in what could emerge as an alternative to conventional sources of private capital reveals HSJ (subscription required). It has had two separate offers from funds interested in financing its new £298m hospital. It is believed this would be the first time this source of finance has been used at scale in the health sector.
Opinion
Is there hope for clinicians in the digital age?
The Guardian’s patient from hell, Dick Vinegar, asks can clinicians cope with NHS IT and the digital age.
“At the beginning of this year I bemoaned that GPs no longer understood IT. Five months later, however, I cheered because the NHS Hack day showed that a lot of clinicians do in fact want clunky NHS IT systems to be improved and are prepared, if only for a weekend, to get down in the mud with loads of geeks and get their hands dirty writing innovative medical Apps.
“But, sadly, in an increasingly digitalised NHS, geeky clinicians are a rare breed. What about the majority of doctors – how much do they understand? And, more importantly, what are they taught about IT in medical school? Not a lot from what I’ve seen in Learning to manage health information, a 56-page document produced by the Department of Health’s embedding informatics in clinical education (eICE) team. It sums this up by admitting that many healthcare professionals continue to have limited or no education in informatics and yet the expectations of them to manage information effectively is a current and increasing requirement.”
Use of emergency hospital beds: why is there so much variation?
Candace Imison of The King’s Fund blogs this week following publication of their latest research in to the use of emergency hospital beds and, that by reducing the current variation that exists; avoidable distress, particularly amongst older people will be lessened.
“How many times have you heard people talk with resignation about the number of older people in hospital beds who ‘don’t need to be there’? The often quoted figures are that between 30-50 percent of older patients could be managed safely outside hospital. There is evidence to support this, but what we hear less about is the variation between different areas’ use of hospital beds.
“Research that we have just completed at The King’s Fund shows a four-fold variation in the use of emergency hospital beds by patients over the age of 65. Average lengths of stay for those over 65 varied from 6-13 days.
“If the 10 primary care trusts (PCTs) with the highest bed use achieved the rates of the ten PCTs with lowest use, around 1,350 beds would not be needed. More than 7,000 hospital beds across England could be released if all PCTs achieved the rate of admission and average length of stay of the lowest 25th percentile. Our research also identified ten PCTs that had managed to reduce average length of stay by 25 percent in three years, and their use of emergency beds by around 20 percent.” Read more…
In the NHS, you are what you tweet
In this week’s blog on HSJ, Joe McCrea of Cogitamus says that social media is no longer optional but an essential tool that must be used by “communitarians” offering value.
Joe writes that recently published research by Ofcom shows that social media is here to stay, with significant and ever-increasing adoption and 32 percent of adults using it daily.
In addition, research by Cogitamus and NHS Confederation showed that to avoid falling behind, NHS organisations have no time to lose and that almost all are actively reviewing their use of social media, often in conjunction with a review of overall communications strategy. He writes:
“We also found social media use is dominated by the ‘four musketeers’ of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. These four co-exist because they serve complementary purposes in different ways.
“Crucially, to ensure it remains valuable and relevant, social media strategy must be closely and explicitly aligned with core aims and outcomes, embedded in key activities, adequately resourced and explicitly performance managed.”
In the grip of Olympic fever
On a light hearted note Dr Phil Peverley, a GP for Sunderland explains how he has become griped by the British Olympics 2012, which is something to be savoured and enjoyed. He writes:
“Well, what it is doctor, it’s me leg. I think I’ve got a bone in it…’ he begins. Well, he doesn’t, not exactly. But suffice it to say, I’m in the middle of a routine consultation in a routine surgery on a routine Wednesday afternoon, when normal life comes to a sudden halt.
“At 48 minutes past three on 1 August 2012, I turn to my patient and, in the middle of a monologue detailing his complaint, I raise a cautionary finger: ‘I’m going to ask you to shut up for a few seconds just now. I’ll get back to you in a minute.’
“I twist the volume dial on the radio, and we hear this: ‘And it’s BRADLEY WIGGINS racing up the final straight, the greatest British Olympian of all time, winning gold for Team GB yet again! The Radio 5 commentary goes on for some time, and I savour a minute or two of rare national success.”
Highland Marketing blog
This week Sarah Bruce reflects on her own personal experience of days spent in a Portuguese hospital that brought her to praise NHS IT!
