Government announces winter capital allocations  The Department of Health and Social Care has announced that 30 trusts will receive a share of £250 million to increase capacity this winter. The money will be used to create beds, A&E cubicles, or assessment spaces – which the government is billing as 900 beds towards the 5,000 promised in the urgent and emergency care recovery plan. However, many of the ‘new’ ‘beds’ will not be on stream until January. And unions have asked where the staff will come from. Sky News pointed out trusts are often unable to open or sustain services of this kind because they divert staff or need expensive agency cover.

Health news: Streamlined cancer targets and proposed action on smoking NHS England has “streamlined” cancer waiting time standards, cutting them from ten to three. NHSE says the flagship target for patients to get a first outpatient appointment with a specialist within two-weeks is ‘outdated’ and will be replaced by a faster diagnosis standard, saying that patients should have cancer diagnosed or ruled out within 28 days. As part of this, trusts will be asked to aim for a ten-day turnaround on urgent cancer test results. The government has also announced that it is going to run a consultation on adding information inserts into tobacco products to encourage people to stop smoking.

Cerner go-live today London Northwest University Healthcare NHS Trust is due to go live with its Cerner Millennium electronic patient record today (Friday). Digitalhealth.net reported that the launch of the new system is the culmination of more than three-years of planning, working from a series of X-posts (tweets) from the trust. Oracle Cerner announced in April 2021 that the trust and The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust had signed up to join the EPR domain that is already in use at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust – the first time that four English trusts have converged in this way.

UnitedHealth closer to buying EMIS The Competition and Markets Authority has provisionally cleared the sale of GP system supplier EMIS to American health giant UnitedHealth. When the deal was announced in March, there were concerns that it would give UnitedHealth and its Optum arm an unfair advantage in using EMIS data for its analytics and population health management solutions, and exclude third parties that integrate with its record systems. However, the CMA has decided this is not the case. Interested parties can now comment on the CMA’s conclusions and a final decision will be made in October (digitalhealth.net).

NHS England issues guidance on picking tech for virtual wards   NHS England has issued further guidance on virtual wards, which it would like to see procured at an integrated care system level. The guidance sets out the minimum requirements for technology to support virtual wards and outlines questions for ICS leads and providers to ask before procuring a technology platform. As a minimum, the guidance says technology must enable patients to measure and input health data; feed a dashboard; and alert the clinical team when a patient moves outside agreed parameters. But it could do more, and the guidance advices ICSs to take a MoSCoW approach to making a decision (must have, should have, could have, won’t have).

NHS England issues MVP spec for system co-ordination centres NHS England has also issued guidance for integrated care systems that need to set up system co-ordination centres, which form a key part of its planning for winter. The document builds on the minimum viable product specification that it put out last October (when system co-ordination centres were called system control centres) and defines what SCCs should do, how they should operate, and what they should achieve. It says SCCs will be expected to have digital software in place that can: monitor a list of key metrics; be accessed through desktop and mobile devices; and generate notifications to act on demand in the system.

Health IT news: South West looks for unified pathology reporting service; Wales rolls out HealthPathways; Royal Cornwall Hospital works with Netcall on portal A prior information notice has been issued by 14 trusts in the South West that are interested in a unified reporting tool for pathology. The Health Tech Newspaper has reported that a tender worth up to £4 million could follow this autumn. Six health boards in Wales are going to adopt the HealthPathways online guidance tool that has been in use at Cardiff and Cale University Health Board since 2018, digitalhealth.net has reported. Royal Cornwall Hospital NHS Trust is working with Netcall on a patient portal called Patient Hub, Digitalhealth.net has reported.

Cloud health news: AWS launches HealthImaging service; Microsoft works with Epic to create Azure Large Instances; Google Health works with Cognizant on generative AI for health admin Amazon has announced the general availability of an AWS HealthImaging service, the Health Tech Newspaper has reported. The service is designed to enable imaging providers to build cloud-native applications to store, analyse and share medical imaging data, while reducing duplication and cost. Microsoft has worked with Epic to create Microsoft Azure Large Instances, a highly scalable public cloud that can handle millions of accesses to huge electronic patient record databases. The Health Tech Newspaper has reported that Mount Sinai Health System in New York is the first customer. Meanwhile, Google Cloud is working with Cognizant to create large language model solutions to automate administrative tasks in healthcare (Jumpstart).