Healthcare IT news in brief

This week’s round up includes a market update from Emis Group, confirmation of the news that Morecambe Bay is sticking with Lorenzo, and an Advanced Carenotes deployment by the Combat Stress charity; plus partnerships in the triage and primary care space.

Emis Group reports slowing market

Emis Group has become the latest healthcare IT company to announce that it is seeing a “slower than expected rate of contract awards in larger NHS procurements.” The company made the comments in its latest trading statement for the six months to the end of June 2016, which otherwise reports that trading is “broadly in line with the board’s expectations” and so are predicted profits.

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay confirms it is retaining Lorenzo

University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust has confirmed that it is going to retain the electronic patient record, Lorenzo, from CSC. Digital Health News reported in April that the trust was set to stick with the system, for which it was an ‘exemplar’ during the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

But it has now confirmed that it signed its own contract with CSC when its national contract ran out at the start of the month. Colin Brown, a consultant physician at the trust, said the system “gives clinicians a full picture of the patient, with the information they need for better-informed decision making.” He added that it also supported the trust’s Better Together clinical strategy, by linking into GPs, community and social services.

Combat Stress goes live with Advanced’s Carenotes

Combat Stress, a mental health charity for veterans, is introducing Carenotes, a hosted patient management system from Advanced, after a lengthy procurement process. The system will be used in the charity’s three treatment centres in Ayrshire, Shropshire and Surrey to manage patient records, bed management and case management. It will also be used in mobile form by community teams.

Capita forms partnership with BMJ

Capita Healthcare Decisions and the BMJ have formed a partnership to combine the clinical decision support tool, BMJ Best Practice, with Capita’s TeleGuide’s clinical decision support software and triage tools, which are used to support clinical decision making when patients first contact healthcare services. Clinicians assessing patients by phone will now have more guidance when triaging.

Microtest and MediBooks are working on medical billing functionality

Microtest and MediBooks are working to deliver medical billing functionality to Microtest’s Open Evolution clinical system; one of the four principal GP IT systems in use in the UK. The solution automatically synchronises relevant patient details from Evolution into MediBooks, so practices no longer have to manually input them; and can be sure that no opportunity for income is missed.