Healthcare IT news in brief

Deployments

Leicester Royal Infirmary installs new pharmacy robot

University of Leicester Hospitals NHS Trust has installed a new pharmacy robot from Asteral. The ARX UK Vmax robotic pharmacy replaces the previous equipment which had reached the end of its agreed lifecycle. It includes a user-friendly touchscreen and barcode system to ensure instant access to stock levels, space availability and expiring stock information. It can also collect eight packets at once, which is a substantial increase over the old robot. The self-cleaning robot is also quieter and is 50% more space efficient at storing packets, opening up further storage space for the trust.   

Jersey introduces e-prescribing

Health and Social Services in Jersey will roll-out JAC's Chemotherapy Management System in the Oncology Department at The General Hospital in St Helier. CMS is a web-based solution for prescribing, scheduling and managing therapies for chemotherapy patients. The hospital has been using JAC’s Pharmacy Management system for a number of years; by rolling out CMS, the Jersey service aims to demonstrate the potential for e-prescribing to improve patient care in oncology before rolling out an e-prescribing and medicines administration system across the rest of the organisation.

Birmingham Women’s deploys Landesk solutions

Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust has deployed multiple Landesk solutions across its new internal IT department platform to provide increased control over the performance and cost of its 1,700 user network. The selected system secures the organisation from external attacks, allowing the team to remotely troubleshoot IT problems and give users the ability to request new devices or software packages. It also automatically schedules and rolls out patches and upgrades across Birmingham Women’s network. Since implementation, the number of IT incidents reported to the trust’s service desk has fallen by 20%.

Whitstable Medical Practice Installs Carestream Vue Cloud PACS

Whitstable Medical Practice has installed Carestream Vue Cloud PACS. The system provides radiologists and clinicians with a complete diagnostic imaging workflow delivered by a cloud-based infrastructure on a pay-as-you go model. Mandy Jackson, lead radiographer at one of the practice's three surgeries, said: “since Carestream PACS has proven to be a valuable tool for quick and easy access to patients' images and reports; it is very user friendly and our staff has been able to get to grips with the system in a very short time frame.”

Analytics enhances employee case management at hospitals trust

Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with ER Tracker from Software Europe. The system will enable the trust to better analyse its case load for trends and blockages in progress, improve speed and quality of reporting to managers and employees, make compliance with policy and Freedom of Information requests easier, and enable greater communication on cases between its team members.

News from Wales

National system to allow ‘real time’ monitoring of infection outbreaks

A new IT system will be rolled out across Wales to enable the NHS to prevent, track, control and manage outbreaks of healthcare-associated infections in hospitals in real time. The Welsh Government is investing £1.9m from the Efficiency through Technology Fund in ICNet, which will alert NHS staff immediately in the event of a case of a healthcare-associated infection. This will ensure response measures are put in place at the earliest opportunity.

New Welsh Clinical Portal searching capability

An advanced new search feature will be added to the next version of the Welsh Clinical Portal (v3.7), which is due to go live this Spring. The portal is used to access patient information, such as medication details, and to request and review test results. The introduction of new open source search technology will make it easier for doctors to also see discharge letters, theatre notes, referral documents and other clinical letters online. Powered by Apache Solr, it will make it quicker and simpler to manage the thousands of clinical documents created every day by NHS Wales.

Company news

Lexacom launches Echo and partners with Docman

Lexacom has launched a cloud based speech recognition solution, Lexacom Echo. Available now, the solution provides two modes for dictation allowing users to choose. Accessed via Lexacom 3, the system offers deferred speech recognition as a standard service and ‘live’ speech recognition compatible with any third party software.

The company has also announced an exclusive partnership with electronic document management supplier Docman, which will see the English deployment of a fully integrated document creation, workflow and management system. A statement from the companies says users will, “benefit from a seamless document creation and workflow platform driving greater levels of efficiency and productivity.”

Agfa Healthcare moves into the integrated care market

Agfa has announced a strategic alliance with My Personal Health Record Express, taking a 27% equity stake in the company. As a first step, both companies have created a patient centric and agile portal for integrated care that can be used by care providers ranging from single facilities to large regional deployments. Additional functionalities will be added to the portfolio in the coming months and will be demonstrated at upcoming industry events.