Health IT news in brief

This week’s health IT news in brief covers new senior appointments at both Capita Healthcare Decisions and Ieso Digital Health, a milestone for Yorkshire and Humber’s genomic medicine centre, and a young entrepreneur’s success in snapping up big-name organisations to adopt his cable management device.

Capita Healthcare Decisions enhances analytics with senior appointment

Capita Healthcare Decisions has appointed Kevin McDonnell as its analytics and benchmarking business director. He will develop the product’s strategy so it meets the ongoing and future needs of healthcare ecosystems.

McDonnell has more than 20 years of experience in the technology sector across the UK, Europe, US and Asia Pacific. “I am focused on helping the business to continue providing innovative benchmarking and analytics that support healthcare organisations around the world and, ultimately, support healthcare providers in improving patient outcomes”, McDonnell said.

New executive appointments at Ieso Digital Health

Ieso Digital Health, a leading digital behavioural health company, has appointed Gidget Madix as chief growth officer. Madix will be responsible for raising awareness of Ieso in the healthcare market and further accelerating its revenue growth and strategic relationships across the US.

Her track record includes leadership of sales growth in some of the United States’ largest and most well-known behavioural healthcare organisations. Leading industry executive Craig Gravina also joins Ieso’s executive leadership team.

1,000^th participant for Yorkshire and Humber’s genomes work

The Yorkshire and Humber NHS Genomic Medicine Centre has recruited its 1,000th participant just 16 months after becoming operational. The centre is one of 13 set up by NHS England to help realise its ambition of sequencing 100,000 genomes by the end of 2018.

Up until recently, determining the sequence of a genome – which contains 3 billion pairs of “letters” from the four-letter genetic alphabet – was a slow and costly process, taking an average of 13 years and costing £2 billion. With the invention of large-scale automatic sequencing machines, the process can now be undertaken in two days at a cost of £1,000.

The national 100,000 Genomes Project is the first and only of its kind in the world.

Google, Amazon and Nasa invest in North East invention

A device invented by Wallsend entrepreneur Mark Costigan has been snapped up by Amazon, Google, GCHQ and NASA. The big-name organisations invested in the SergeantClip which is a network and infrastructure cable management system.

It is designed to help IT engineers ensure that once a cable has been removed from a device it is replaced in the correct port, reducing the risk of human error, speeding up the process and potentially saving customers money. Costigan hopes to see SergeantClip – which is manufactured in the UK – become standard practice for all networking or cabling.