Discover strategies and solutions at EHI Live

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EHI Live is the annual conference where CTOs, clinical technologists, DoH and Trust representatives can meet and learn from each other and a wealth of technology providers. This year’s show in November will be notable as the first time many organisations on both sides will have come to terms with life after NPfIT – just in time for the upheaval of a major service redesign…

Now in it’s fifth year, EHI Live, the conference and exhibition for eHealth professionals, will take place at Birmingham’s NEC on 6-7th November, 2012. This year’s conference programme is split into five streams, the two most substantial being:

  • “The Big Picture” – policy and business issues facing the NHS
  • “Major Works Ahead” – an opportunity to learn from experienced NHS IT Directors and clinicians who have run major deployment or change projects

…plus, for the first time, a CCIO Leaders Network Conference, for clinicians taking on a leadership role in IT and information projects.

Jon Hoeksma, founder and Director of E-Health Media says, “Over the next few years, the NHS will have to absorb the latest round of NHS reform, while dealing with a financial challenge that its Chief Executive has described as ‘unprecedented’. If it is going to cope, while improving services, it is going to need to use IT; both to make its present working processes more efficient and to find new ways to deal with patients who will increasingly expect to access services online. As the National Programme for IT in the NHS winds down, without delivering the systems that it promised to many trusts; boards, IT directors and clinicians are going to have to find their own way forward.”

Mark Smith, Director - Healthcare, Life Sciences & Consumer Healthcare, Microsoft UK, agrees; and says the demise of NPfIT has created a change in the way healthcare institutions and technology providers work with each other.

“Since the move from centralised to localised procurement within the NHS, Microsoft has changed the way that it engages with NHS Trusts. We have invested significantly in our engagement strategy with additional resources focused on positioning relevant solutions through our Partners. This focus and investment with our Partners is key in our attendance at EHI Live as we are keen to demonstrate our commitment to Healthcare.”

What’s on offer

For this reason, Microsoft’s presence at EHI Live 2012 comes in the form of the “Microsoft Solutions Showcase”, in which delegates can meet not only the Microsoft Healthcare team, but also several of the most experienced and knowledgeable specialist healthcare Partners from around the UK. Here are some of the stand-out services on offer:

Single sign-on, “follow-me” desktop

Several Partners have used Microsoft technologies to deliver healthcare-specific single sign-on (SSO) services. These variously allow NHS smartcard users to sign on once per shift rather than once per session, and for a user’s desktop and patient view to move seamlessly from device to device. It saves hours per person per year, improves the clinicians’ experience, drives governance and cuts data errors.

A partnership between Enline and Ultima Business Solutions has developed a solution allowing users to:

    • Sign in once to access any application
    • Log on to any device and automatically pick up where they left off
    • Keep the same patient information in focus across all clinical systems

OCSL will also be exhibiting acceSSOnce; bringing users

  • An agile, centralised, clinical workspace
  • Enhanced speed of access to applications and session persistence
  • Trust-wide delivery on a robust and resilient platform

Adoption of and migration into Cloud technologies

Smith says, “The government wants to see 50% of technology purchasing to be the cloud by 2015 – but NHS organisations feel hampered particularly by data protection concerns.” The government has gone some way to providing a validated environment with the “G-Cloud” framework, and the first crop of healthcare-specific services are now becoming available.

 

Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner IM Group are specialists in deploying hybrid (cloud and on-premise, off-the-shelf and customised) solutions like Office 365. The company was the first to deliver healthcare services across G-Cloud with a hybrid deployment of Office 365 at West Midlands Ambulance Service. At EHI Live, they will be demonstrating the full Office 365 suite, along with advocating innovative approaches to the challenge of protecting sensitive data.

Patient relationship management, appointment wastage, long term condition management

These are just some of the wide-ranging healthcare applications to which the commercial discipline of CRM (customer relationship management) is regularly applied. Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM solution – now also available in the Cloud as CRM Online - is in use in thousands of businesses across the world; and now rapidly finding favour in healthcare too.

Optevia will be exhibiting a range of solutions based on Dynamics CRM, including

    • A Single Community Care Record (developed with Torbay Care Trust) including full mobile working on- and offline for community based staf
    • Self-service access for long term condition managemen
    • Business systems for managing assets, equipment, rooms and service
    • Winning contracts and developing business opportunities for health providers

2e2, meanwhile has customised the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product suite to provide a full portal-based service which allows NHS organisations to share personal data securely with their patients and any patient-authorised healthcare partners. 

This single point of access solution for example empowers the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme by allowing Mental Health Trusts to provide one-stop contact centres which can rapidly retrieve rich, aggregated clinical information and route callers to the right clinical practitioner, irrespective of their location.

30 Day Readmissions

2e2 has also customised the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product suite to provide a solution that assists Trusts in the management of 30 day emergency readmissions, reducing the financial burden associated with patients who re-present within the 30 day window. Integrated into the incumbent A & E system, the 30 Day readmission solution gives all appropriate care providers in each pathway access via a portal with prompts and triggers to ensure all follow up engagements are carried out in line with discharge requirements.      

SharePoint: intranets and service portals

Cloud2 specialise in providing successful, flexible and fast-deployment SharePoint solutions to the NHS. The company will be demonstrating its ‘Hadron’ NHS-ready SharePoint architecture, which enables documents to be safely managed, stored, searched and retrieved, so up-to-date, approved information is instantly available to all staff.

Additional solutions include, Hadron Migrate, Rapid BI and KPI dashboards, out-of-the-box governance solutions such as CQC, IG, NHSLA (NHS) and Board Assurance and a suite of e-Forms for standard HR processes. All Cloud2 solutions are scalable and come with a full onboarding process to ensure successful on-going usage and expansion.

Specialist solutions

Other providers at EHI Live’s Microsoft Solutions Showcase, meanwhile, offer a broad base of healthcare solutions. Risual is a Systems Integrator working to develop, deploy and support ICT services to health sector organisations, including an impressive roster of NHS clients. Their healthcare services include:

    • Identity / access management & clinical application integratio
    • Clinical and business process automation using eform
    • Clinical informatics and business intelligence – clinical portals and dashboard
    • Unified Communications & Tele-health

In addition to all this, EHI Live happens to come at a time when Microsoft is announcing several major launches; including:

    • Windows 8: the most significantly developed version of the Windows Operating System in over a decade, including massively improved support and functionality for the tablet computers which are seen at so many bedsides already
    • Windows Server 2012: the latest version of the world’s most popular workhorse server environment; designed for ease of use, low-touch maintenance and maximum security; and featuring simple optimisation, virtualization and cloud Integration.

The company also has more users than ever of healthcare specific services, from HealthVault, the UK’s only enterprise-grade consumer-facing healthcare data repository; to Identity Agent, a healthcare-specific identity management tool currently in trial use in over 30 Trusts.

To find out more, come to the Microsoft Solutions Showcase; Stand E50 at EHI Live 2012.