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Monday, October 31, 2005

OSS Watch Wiki

OSS Watch Wiki

OSS Watch, the open source software advisory service from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), has announced the launch of a public wiki.

Wiki's are an evolving open content phenomenon. Anyone can visit a wiki to read pages, edit pages and add new pages. Adding content is easy, which makes sharing knowledge in a community easy. In this they match up nicely with the spirit of free and open source software.

OSS Watch provides unbiased advice and guidance about free and open source software for UK further and higher education. The launch of this wiki marks an important step towards sustainable community support for open source software.

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New report looks at suitability of Creative Commons for UK public sector

New report looks at suitability of Creative Commons for UK public sector

Complex issues about copyright and intellectual property rights have for many years proved a stumbling block to sharing of resources. This new report commissioned from Intrallect and the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property & Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh, by the Common Information Environment (CIE) explores many of the issues and suggests possible ways forward via Creative Commons licensing.

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How much is a blog worth?

I've just come across a strange tool, Dane Carson on a Business Opportunities Weblog, which was inspired by Tristan Louis's research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I've created this little applet using Technorati's API which computes and displays your blog's worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

I'm not sure about the algorithm used & whether the number of clicks & links can truely be considered to equal "worth", but I think it is an interesting idea - for the "value" of this blog see below.


My blog is worth $3,951.78.
How much is your blog worth?



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Sunday, October 30, 2005

BCS Meeting - Sean Brennan on NPfIT



BCS Meeting - Sean Brennan on NPfIT

I'm currently finalising the arrangements for a joint meeting of the BCS Nursing Specialist Group and Bristol Branch, to be held at UWE on 17th Nov, at which Sean Brennan will be speaking about "The NHS IT Project: the biggest computer programme in the world... ever!".

Details of the meeting are available from the link above & I still have a few places left. If you want to come please get in touch.

The title is taken from Sean's new book which is still available from Amazon & all good book shops.



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Friday, October 28, 2005

Information is the key to success in the NHS

Information is the key to success in the NHS

This article in the Independent Online (28th Oct 2005) examines a variety of roles in the NHS falling under the Health Informatics banner and usees vignettes from a range of staff to illustrate some of the trials and tribualtions for potential staff.

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Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Complementary competencies: public health and health sciences librarianship

Complementary competencies: public health and health sciences librarianship

This article (which is available in full text for free) from the Journal of the Medical Library Association (93(3): 338–347) by Marcus A. Banks, Keith W. Cogdill, Catherine R. Selden, and Marjorie A. Cahn, sought to identify opportunities for partnership between the communities of public health workers and health sciences librarians.

The authors "reviewed competencies in public health and health
sciences librarianship, and drawing on historical and contemporary experience, this paper presents an initial framework for forming collaborations between health sciences librarians and members of the public health workforce."

As the paper points out there are a range of "correspondences" which exist between many of the public health informatics competencies and the skills essential to being a successful health sciences librarian.

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Adoption and perception of electronic clinical communications in Scotland

IngentaConnect Adoption and perception of electronic clinical communications in Scotland

This article from June's edition of Informatics in Primary Care (13(2) 97-104), by Claudia Pagliari, Peter Donnan, Jill Morrison, Ian Ricketts, Peter Gregor, and Frank Sullivan reports a survey of the change in uptake of the NHS Scotland Electronic Clinical Communications Implementation Programme (ECCI) across Scotland over a 15 month period.

The survey showed "Across Scotland as a whole, the process of implementation was gradual. While there were marked gains in the availability of ECCI facilities over the observation period, rates of adoption lagged behind and varied across alternative facilities." and that "Perceived benefits of ECCI facilities included convenience, ease of use, time-saving and provision of an audit trail. Perceived barriers included the need to duplicate data entry where new systems were not universally implemented, technological difficulties, time, training and resources."

The study concluded that "Whilst, among users of ECCI facilities, perceptions of the programme and its potential benefits were generally positive, its full impact will not become evident until the new electronic tools are implemented nationally and have been more fully integrated into normal work routines."

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Watch Your health, your care, your say live on the net

Watch Your health, your care, your say live

The Department of Health is planning to webcast it's national listening event in Birmingham on 29 October. This is aprt of the "Your health, your care, your say" consultation excercise.

I wonder what the viewing figures will be?

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NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement

NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement

The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement has recently launched a new service, which enables you to register to use their search engine and sign up for regular tailored newsletters.

As they say in their email when you sign up: "The site is under development so not all services will be available immediately nor are they in a final fully polished package, however we want to encourage early use and as much feedback as possible in order to help us develop the site to meet your needs." and there are some areas which still don't seem to have much content or work intuitively.

The services they are aiming to provide include:

* Searching for information: The Institute monitors a range of innovation and improvement web sites enabling you to find relevant resources. You can search these sources through the Institute web site and can save searches with the results and a summary e-mailed to you when new matches are found. We welcome suggestions for other sites to include within our search index.

* Recommended information: The Institute web site will recommend documents which appear to be of interest to you based on your saved searches and your activity profile on the site.

* Newsletters: You can register to receive newsletters on a range of topics

* Searching for people: you can search for people with relevant interests or expertise. This is based on peoples saved searches and personal profiles. You can only access people search if you yourself have agreed to share your details.

* Collaboration, discussion and co-creation of documents: you can work in collaboration with other registered users to create documents and discuss topics of interest

This appears to be an interesting move towards trying to provide a customised information service which cuts out some irrelevant information and provides material which is particularly tailored to an individual's role. At the moment the search function appears to only identify documents from the National Library for Health & National electronic Library for Health (which are still running in parallel and overlap) and the Department of Health, it will be interesting to see what other sources are seen as being reliable & what the criteria for selecting these are.

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Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Architecture for Knowledge-Based and Federated Search of Online Clinical Evidence

Architecture for Knowledge-Based and Federated Search of Online Clinical Evidence

This interesting paper has just been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

The authors Enrico Coiera, Martin Walther, Ken Nguyen and Nigel H Lovell from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, clearly identify some of issues for clinicians in keeping up with the volumes of relevant literature and difficulties in searching across multiple databases for relevant information.

Their approach uses federated meta search tools, with a variety of filters (e.g. disease processes) into a system they have called "Quick Clinical (QC) which guides the user through the different profiles and keywords into queries which can be sent to a variety of different resources and their individual syntax in an effort to identify key resources in the shortest time possible. The interface and architecture which underly QC are described and their integration into Unified Query Language (UQL) and Unified Response Language (URL) using XML outlined.

I was slightly confused by their explanation of how "specific wrappers translate a UQL query into the native query language and format of the source", but I'm sure this will make sense to the more technically advanced. Some initial technical and user evaluation data is presented, but I think we will have to wait to see whether the product is scaleable and whether it is more widely adopted before decisions can be made about it's possible utility in clinical practice.


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AMIA2005 - VistA and EHR

This morning's panel sessiojn titled 'Deployment of the VistA Free and Open Source EHR/EMR Software Stack' was well-attended, attracting about 150 attendees to 4 speakers about various aspects of VistA (http://www.worldvista.org/AboutVistA/), WorldVistA (www.worldvista.org/) and free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) in healthcare.

The panel was chaired by Ignacio Valdes, Editor of Linux Medical News (www.linuxmednews.com). The opening speaker, K.S. Bhaskar, looked at open source software deployment issues, and provided a general overview of FLOSS and whay it should be used. Stating that his mission was 'world domination with free/open source software', he recapped many of the issues of the benefits of FLOSS in terms of security, quality and price, as well as the issues around freedom (the libre/free elements). On the security issues of FLOSS, he asserted that 'monocultures are essentially insecure' and that 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'.

KS went on to describe some of the aspects of FLOSS business models, including lack of licensing charges, lack of restrictions on use, and thus the exploration of revenue generating potential based in support, education, enhancements and implementations. He concluded by discussing some aspects of the porting of VistA on GT.M and GNU/Linux.

David Whitten covered 'WorldVistA deployment and support plans', Brian Lord addressed aspects of business models for WorldVistA and vendors, and Ignacio Valdes concluded the session by looking at aspects of public policy.

The session concluded with the award of this year's Linux Medical News Freedom Award to Joseph Dal Molin.


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Informatics in Primary Care vol. 13 no. 3 November 2005

Informatics in Primary Care vol. 13 no. 3 November 2005

The latest edition of the journal Informatics in Primary Care has just been published. It includes the following articles;

TI: Is the time right for direct entry into a career in health and biomedical informatics?
AU: de Lusignan, Simon; Ellis, Beverley

TI: A real-time, mobile phone-based telemedicine system to support young adults with type 1 diabetes
AU: Farmer, Andrew; Gibson, Oliver; Hayton, Paul; Bryden, Kathryn; Dudley, Christina; Neil, Andrew; Tarassenko, Lionel

TI: Designing and implementing an electronic health record system in primary care practice in sub-Saharan Africa: a case study from Cameroon
AU: Kamadjeu, Raoul M.; Tapang, Euloge M.; Moluh, Roland N.

TI: The implementation of electronic services: planned or organic growth?
AU: Cole, John; Colledge, Malcolm; Megaw, Tony; Powls, Martin; Bullock, Seth; Keen, Justin

TI: Pandora's electronic box: GPs reflect upon email communication with their patients
AU: Goodyear-Smith, Felicity; Wearn, Andy; Everts, Hans; Huggard, Peter; Halliwell, Joan

TI: Development of functional requirements for electronic health communication: preliminary results from the ELIN project
AU: Christensen, Tom; Grimsmo, Anders

TI: Randomised studies in general practice: how to integrate the electronic patient record
AU: Mosis, Georgio; Koes, Bart; Dieleman, Jeanne; Ch Stricker, Bruno; van der Lei, Johan; Sturkenboom, Miriam C.J.M.

TI: INRstar: computerised decision support software for anticoagulation management in primary care
AU: Jones, Robert Treharne; Sullivan, Mark; Barrett, David

TI: Links between systems in Accident & Emergency and primary care
AU: Harrop, Nick

TI: The National Alliance for Primary Care Informatics: an update
AU: Bates, David W.


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AMIA2005 - open source event

The AMIA OSWG (Open Source Working Group) business meeting was held on Monday evening. It was well-attended, with 35-40 people present, although only 8-10 were actually signed-up OSWG members.

The meeting was chaired by Alric M O'Connor, who began by announcing the results of the elections for the leadership team. Alric was confirmed as Chair-elect, with Ignacio Valdes as ViceChair and Will Ross as Secretary. Bill Lober was confirmed as a member-at-large, as was Fred Trotter.

The meeting discussed plans for what the WG wants to do in the next few years, and a number of interesting and exciting ideas were generated. Among these were an open source symposium at a future AMIA conference, a thinktank/OpenSteps North America meeting, and encouragement of presentations and other FLOSS contributions to international conferences, including trying to get a full track at future conferences, including AMIA.

About 10 members then adjourned to the Polo India Club restaurant for food, drinks and further discussions. A very pleasant evening and useful meeting - more information will appear in due course for OSWG members and via other sources.

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Monday, October 24, 2005

AMIA2005 - Monday second report

'Personal health records:problems and solutions' is the title of a session including four presentations dealing with aspects of personal health records; in the UK, it has implications for developments such as MyHealthSpace.

In the paper 'How accurate is information that patients contribute to their electronic health record?' Lynn Volk from Partners' Healthcare System reported on research that had been undertaken on patient input to their electronic records. She reported that electronic health records are often complete and patient contributions can help to provide a complete record. However, she suggested that their needs to be doctor overview of the patient input. This provoked a number of questions about the relative roles and knowledge levels of patients and their doctors.

'Online communication and support for cancer patients: a relationship-centric design framework' was presented by Jacob Weiss from Vanderbilt University. He based his presentation in a hypothesis that informatics can support the communication that is an essential part of cancer support and care. He highlighted the importance of communication and support needs for informal caregivers.

He looked at different tyoes of relationships (eg clinical and supportive relationships) and compared the sorts of questions and explanations that might be seen within two models, ie a relationship-centric design and an information-centric design. In the former, the interactions between people help to explain the communication, while in the latter, the exchange of data/information is the focus. It is an interestiong comparison.

Other papers in the session were:

'Household computer and Internet access: the digital divide in a paediatric clinic population' and 'Copy fees and patients' rights to obtain a copy of their medical records: from law to reality'

The session seems to be very popular, with a fairly full room, so there must be about 250 or so people attending this session.

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AMIA2005 - Monday morning report

Monday morning already, and another day of meetings - maybe I'll get to actually attend some of the conference sessions. On Sunday evening, Graham Wright and I presented our workshop, based in the Education Steps project (see www.differance-engine.net/educationsteps/
documents/otley2005outputs.htm
). We had 10 brave souls who had nothing better to do with their Sunday evenings than come to our workshop. We presented some of the rationale and background to the project, what had been done so far, and some of the plans for future work. Then, as it was meant to be an interactrive workshop, we got the attendees to look at some of the outputs of the Otley meeting and give their views, from a perspective of people coming from different backgrounds and health systems. The results of the discussions will be added to the project report in due course.

Sunday afternoon saw the opening of the conference, and of the exhibition area, which includes a mixture of commercial providers showing their wares and university departments providing information about their health informatics offerings.

More reports later today, time and wireless access permitting.

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Sunday, October 23, 2005

AMIA2005 - Sunday afternoon report

AMIA2005 is now in full swing here in Washington DC. This is the first opportunity I have had to sit down and try and write a little about what is going on.

As Rod Ward and I have discovered from previous conference blogs, the secret of successful blogging at these events is not to be doing too many other things - so, breaking this rule right from ther start, I have been busy with meetings etc. and not had time to write.

We arrived into a dull and wet Dulles airport on Friday afternoon - weather fairly similar to what we left behind at Heathrow. After doing some of the tourist trail yesterday (Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the newly-opened American Indian Museum, and then Union Station for afternoon tea), today has been a succession of meetings, and it's still only mid afternoon.

As well as the many formal meetings in the programme of AMIA Working Groups and other groups, there is the usual host of opportunistic meetings that people organise at these events. So, froma working breakfast, it was on to a 3-hour meeting of the IMIA Strategic Planning group, and then a quick dash down to the Cosmos Club for a brunch and the launch of the new edition of Saba and McCormick's 'Essentials of Computers for NUrses'. Many of the chapter authors were present, including my co-author on the 'open source and free software' chapter, Alric O'Connor.

The wireless network here seems to be working well for Internet access, so I hope to be able to provide some 'live' reports from some of the meetings - we have our Education Steps workshop later this evening, and the business meeting of the AMIA Open SOurce Working Group tomorrow (MOnday) evening.

More to follow as time permits and there is something worth reporting on.

Peter Murray

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Friday, October 21, 2005

USAID Global Health E-Learning Center

USAID Global Health E-Learning Center

The USAID Global Health Bureau has announced the new Global Health E-Learning Center. The Center offers a series of health and population e-learning courses that will cover a wide range of public health issues.

Six beginning course offerings are now available:

-Antenatal Care
-IUD
-Logistics for Health Commodities
-Preventing Postpartum Hemorrhage
-Standard Days Method
-Tuberculosis Basics

The e-learning courses will:

-Provide useful and timely continuing education for professionals interested in health and population issues

-Offer state-of-the-art technical content on key public health topics

-Serve as a practical resource for increasing public health knowledge

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Thursday, October 20, 2005

Technocrati tags for blog posts

Technocrati tags for blog posts

Regular readers of this blog may notice that a few recent and (hopefully) all future posts on Informaticopia will have technocrati tags at the bottom. These are a way of easily linking to messages on other blogs about similar topics. By clicking on them you will see a list of other recent posts from around the world which have used the same terms for tags.

Another new innovation for me is that this is the first post written with the blogger plug in for word which enables you to write a message (& spell check etc) in word and then easily publish it to the blog see http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html

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Tomorrow's operating room to harness Net, RFID etc

Tomorrow's operating room to harness Net, RFID

This story from CNET News.com reports a presentation at a conference in San Francisco of the sort of data management systems which could revolutionise work in operating theatres, including the wearing of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags by nurses and doctors to track their locations - just one of the myriad of RFID applications in healthcare which are emerging at present.

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2005 Health Libraries Week

November 14th – 18th this year sees the 2nd annual Health Libraries Week, co-ordinated by the National Library for Health (NLH) a library and information service for the NHS, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It offers a range of services to support patient care, staff development and research. The library mixes traditional services such as professional support from NHS library staff, with web based services such as a comprehensive search engine, clinical question answering, and current awareness. The NLH’s web resource can be found at www.library.nhs.uk, and work is under way to link and develop existing local NHS library resources, both electronic and traditional.

The aim of the week is to raise the profile of health library services, and increase awareness of the range of library and information services and resources available to those working in healthcare in England.

Did you know that health library services offer help and advice from skilled staff, journal and book collections – electronic as well as paper, study space and internet access, training courses and current awareness services, search services and document delivery – all designed to help busy healthcare staff find the best available evidence about healthcare matters as quickly as possible.

In addition to the personal services within local libraries, the National Library for Health website (www.library.nhs.uk) is available to all NHS staff in England, allowing access to information at a time and place that is convenient to them. The NLH website offers a range of Specialist Libraries that identify the best evidence on a range of the major healthcare topics, as well as links to high-quality resources such as the Cochrane Library and the BMJ’s Clinical Evidence. NHS staff can also access bibliographic databases such as Medline and Cinahl, as well as over 1500 full text journals and a collection of electronic books. The site also offers a search engine, a question answering service aimed at staff working in primary care, and news and current awareness services.

There will be various events taking place in and around health libraries up and down the country during Health Libraries Week - why not take the opportunity to contact your library and see what they have to offer, and how you can best make use of their services to support patient care?

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Wednesday, October 19, 2005

careandhealth - Laming challenges child database plans

careandhealth - Laming challenges child database plans

This interview on CareandHealth.com highlights the change in views of Lord Laming about the setting up a of a national child database as set out in the Climbie inquiry and taken up by the Department for Education and Skills in their document "Every Child Matters".

He now feels that this would not be useful "A national, all singing, all dancing, complicated database, accessible to everybody is not only expensive but I doubt it will improve case outcomes. It also breaches reasonable safeguards of data protection."

Perhaps the concerns, which have been raised by various groups, about the implications of the setting up this sort of database are now being heard & I wonder what the implications for NHS Connecting for Health and the National Programme for IT will be?

The comments coming out at the same time as the ID bill being passed by the hose of commons (with some new caveats), highlight issues around the relationship between rights and responsibilities and the individual versus the sate.

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AMIA2005 - the prequel

The 2005 Autumn (or in US parlance, Fall) Symposium of AMIA, the American Medical Informatics Association, takes place in Washington, DC, USA on 22-26 October. Rather than develop a separate blog for the event, as has been done for MIE2005 (see www.deltadigital.no/s9y/), SINI2005 (see www.differance-engine.net/SINI2005blog/) and other events, a series of reports from the event will appear here.

Titled 'Biomedical and health informatics: from foundations to applications to policy', the event has the usual conference structure and mix of posters, peer-reviewed papers, panels, workshops, etc. As always with events outside the UK, it is going to be interesting to compare the 'view of the health informatics world' as seen from the USA with what is happening in the UK, and to see if there are any similarities and similar lessons. A first quick look through the programme seems to show a strong emphasis on biomedical computing and bioinformatics, as well as uses of GRID technology, genomics, and the usual plethora of talks about terminologies, ontologies, and electronic health records. An increasing focus in this event, and other US conferences, is on disaster planning and management, and there seems to be a growing interest in personal health records.

Assuming the technology allows, there will be more starting on Saturday.

Peter Murray


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Monday, October 17, 2005

Medical record linkage in health information systems by approximate string matching and clustering

Medical record linkage in health information systems by approximate string matching and clustering

This interesting paper by 3 French researchers has just been published in the open access Biomed Central journal Medical Informatics and Decision Making.

The paper highlights important issues which arise where health records from several sources are being combined into single databases for communication & record sharing purposes. This is a major headache currently for NHS Connecting for Health & the UK's National Porgramme for IT which is trying to match records from GPs, hospitals etc where each patient may have multiple records each with different hospital numbers.

The study analysed 300,000 records & found over 10% had 2 or more records for the same patient - I suspect this ratio may be even higher in the UK - and examines tools to enable accurate matching and aggregation of these records.

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Thursday, October 13, 2005

Blackboard and WebCT Announce Plans to Merge

Blackboard and WebCT Announce Plans to Merge

This announcement that the 2 major players in the provision of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) in UK Higher and Further Education are too merge has some significant implications.

Potentially the resulting products could incorporate the best features of both, but the virtual monopoly it could create may limit development opportunities and affect the pricing regimes.

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Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Audit Commission - Early lessons from payment by results

Audit Commission - Early lessons from payment by results

The audit commission has released its report on "Early lessons from payment by results" which includes some important lessons for all sectors of the NHS.

In particular the report highlights problems with the quality of data and the mechanisms for recording clinical activity, particularly coding, on which the payments are being made.

"Good information systems that produce high-quality data on clinical activity and cost are important for sound management and delivery of patient care......As part of investment planned under NHS Connecting for Health, a comprehensive electronic Care Records Service should be in place by 2010, which will go some way towards achieving this. However, trusts still need to strengthen their internal arrangements to produce timely and accurate data."

"Coding of diagnoses and procedures is particularly important under payment by results, as these codes are two principal determinants of the HRG that the patient is assigned to, which in turn determines income. Incomplete coding translates to loss of income for trusts, while inaccurate coding leads to inaccurate payments, which can impact negatively on the finances of providers or commissioners.

We have previously highlighted weaknesses in clinical coding at NHS trusts, pointing to significant levels of uncoded activity, outdated patient administration systems and weak coding arrangements. Payment by results provides the incentives to improve data quality and we can already see the increased priority this is being given across the NHS."

As a result of these systems being introduced it appears that the average number of diagnoses recorded for each patient has increaswed significantly. The report also considers moves from ICD10 and OPCS classifications to SNOMED and the disruption involved.

"NHS Connecting for Health will require most NHS trusts to invest in their information systems and migrate data between systems. Several NHS trusts, including foundation trusts, implemented new systems in 2004/05, and found that the level of disruption was greater than expected. In extreme cases, it resulted in no activity information being available for the majority of the financial year. Under payment by results, where income is based on activity levels, this exposes trusts to considerable financial risk. Trusts and PCTs need to be aware of the risk that this presents and, if possible, put in place contingency arrangements to protect against loss of income due to associated data-quality issues. One foundation trust negotiated a block contract for 2004/05, which set a minimum level of income; while another based financial reports on estimates rather than actual activity."

For further discussion of this report and it's implications see:

E-Health Insider Investment in clinical coding now critical

Guardian - Too much, too often, too disruptive

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Tuesday, October 11, 2005

OpenClinical Latest

OpenClinical Home: Knowledge management technologies and applications for healthcare

A series of new reports and articles have just been published on open clinical;

Background -

Electronic medical records - provides definitions, barriers and benefits of EMR systems, an overview of standards and brief update on the situation in different countries.

e-Health - provides definitions, barriers and benefits + an expanded bibliography

Public reports: e-Health - overview and excerpts from national & international governenments & bodies eg WHO & EU

National information technology programmes for healthcare and first set of summaries of implementation plans covering Canada, England, France, New Zealand, USA.

Research - Projects

EORCA: (France) Development of a formal method for modelling collaborative medical activities in the ICU to support the creation of care team guidelines

Clinical - Demonstrators

ASEMR: (US) Active Semantic Electronic Medical Record for Cardiology

Commercial - Suppliers

iSoft: (UK & others) Integrated patient and clinical information systems - LORENZO: enterprise-wide clinical and administrative application. LORENZO is the electronic medical record planned for implementation in three of the five cluster regions that make up the NHS Connecting for Health programme in England.


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eMJA: The woefully wired world of health service computing

eMJA: The woefully wired world of health service computing

This "Postcard from the UK" in an Australian Medical Journal gives a succinct and perceptive overview of the state of informatics in the NHS. It highlights many of the issues which are a factor of daily life for many clinicians and paints a depressing picture, presumably aimed at Australian Medical colleagues.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

The Impact of e-Health and Assistive Technologies on Healthcare

The Impact of e-Health and Assistive Technologies on Healthcare

This report which is designed to:
* encourage and facilitate the application of appropriate technologies to support the modernisation of healthcare service delivery

and

* identify effective procedures and practices which may be extendable or transferable to other disciplines and/or to other organisations.

has been produced by TeHIP (The E-Health Innovation Professionals' Group of the Institute of Healthcare Management, ASSIST and the British Computer Society Health Informatics Forum) following interviews, questionnaires and workshops with more than 100 clinicians, healthcare managers, informaticians, equipment and service suppliers.

The report argues for active implementation of ehealth projects in advance of the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) implementation because of a "lack of understanding" about the importance and potential of e-health, as well as confusion over what exactly e-health is. Because of this, small-scale projects tend to stay that way, petering out due to the inability to prove clinical benefits and ehealth is seen as an IT and never a care issue, and that clinical benefits were not generally understood by IT staff.

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Health | Hewitt agrees to hand over NHS statistics to private firm

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Health | Hewitt agrees to hand over NHS statistics to private firm

Interesting speculation in today's Guardian that there are plans to "privatise" the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

This is particularly significant in the light of discussions about using data from this centre in the 2011 Census.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

IngentaConnect Table Of Contents: He@lth Information on the Internet 47(1)

IngentaConnect Table Of Contents: He@lth Information on the Internet 47(1)

The latest edition of He@lth Information on the Internet has just been published and includes the following articles:

TI: Wikipedia
AU: Childs, Sue

TI: The NLH Primary Care Question Answering Service
AU: Brassey, Jon

TI: Current literature
AU: Anagnostelis, Betsy

TI: Networking nutrition research
AU: Astley, Sian

TI: Bookmarks: health economics
AU: Blenkinsopp, John

TI: View from the front line: information sources
AU: Brown, Harry

TI: NLH: the customer perspective
AU: Turner, Alison

TI: What's new?
AU: Williamson, Laurian

Journal of Medical Internet Research - Table of Contents Volume 7, Issue 5 (2005)

Journal of Medical Internet Research - Table of Contents Volume 7, Issue 5 (2005)

2 new interesting articles have just been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research:

A Historical Overview of Health Disparities and the Potential of eHealth Solutions
Michael Christopher Gibbons, J Med Internet Res 2005 (Oct 4); 7(5):e50
OPEN ACCESS (HTML): http://www.jmir.org/2005/5/e50/
MEMBERS ONLY (PDF): http://www.jmir.org/2005/4/e50/?pdf

Computers and the Internet: Tools for Youth Empowerment

Ruta K Valaitis, J Med Internet Res 2005 (Oct 4); 7(5):e51
OPEN ACCESS (HTML): http://www.jmir.org/2005/5/e51/
MEMBERS ONLY (PDF): http://www.jmir.org/2005/4/e51/?pdf

Saturday, October 01, 2005

The NHS Faculty of Health Informatics

The Faculty

The NHS Faculty of Health Informatics was recently launched on the 28th September 2005 and aims to develop a national community of practice for health informatics learning and development, applied research and professional services across a wide range of clinical and professional backgrounds across the NHS and the academic sector.

The faculty will act as a national focal point for the study and facilitation of informatics learning and research on behalf of the National Health Service, working with partners including further and higher education institutions on related interests.

It will be interesting to see how many people apply for membership and the role that this new body plays in developments over the next few years.

CfH Academic Partnerships Manager

Academic Partnerships Manager

This interesting job advert appeared during the week for someone to manage the relationships between higher and further education and NHS Connecting for Health within the Informatics Programme and emerging NHS Faculty of Health Informatics.

This shows an explicit recognition that research, education, training and development provision, contribute directly to the achievement and maintenance of the highest standards in NHS Information programmes and wider NHS functioning and development.

If the post wasn't based in Leeds I would be considering the role myself!