Microsoft at the NHS Innovation EXPO
The Department of Health has launched an ambitious programme to support and spread innovation in the NHS that includes a new Innovation EXPO. Microsoft will be at the event in London’s docklands next month, and so will some of its partners working in healthcare. Lyn Whitfield reports.
In the final report of his Next Stage Review of the NHS, Lord Darzi said he wanted to see a “pioneering” health service that encouraged innovation.
“Throughout my career, in all the clinical teams I have worked in, my colleagues and I have challenged each other to improve the care we provide for patients,” the health minister and chair of surgery at Imperial College, London, wrote in High Quality Care for All.
“Continuous advances in clinical practice mean the NHS constantly has the opportunity to improve. [We will make] changes that will help the NHS to provide high quality care across the board.”
A year after the report was published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the NHS, the Department of Health is taking forward its pledges on innovation.
The Innovation for a Healthier Future programme includes a £20 million prize fund for ideas that will tackle “the key health challenges facing the nation”, a new legal duty on strategic health authorities (SHAs) to promote innovation, and a £220 million fund for them to spread best practice over five years.
It also includes a new Innovation EXPO that will be held at the huge ExCel conference centre in London’s docklands from 18-19 June. The EXPO will have speakers, seminars and showcases – one of them featuring the work of Microsoft and its partners in the healthcare sector.
Surface computing comes to healthcare
“A lot of innovation happens in the NHS, the difficult bit is spreading it across the health service,” says Mark Treleaven, Microsoft’s healthcare strategic marketing manager in the UK. “The EXPO is an opportunity for people to see some of the things that are going on and to be inspired by them.”
The Microsoft stand will be a rare opportunity to see Microsoft Surface; a revolutionary table-top computer that does away with a keyboard and a mouse and lets people touch and manipulate maps, pictures, forms and other digital content with their hands.
The EXPO’s Surface computer will be running three healthcare applications, including Microsoft Amalga, which pulls data from hospital systems so it can be re-used in creative ways, and Microsoft HealthVault, which puts patients in charge of their records and other healthcare information.
Microsoft will also be showing healthcare teams how they can communicate in real time using Office Communications Server (OCS) and how they can improve video-conferences with RoundTable, a device that allows participants to see each other and keep a better track of the flow of conversation.
Ideas for surgeries, wards and patients
Three companies that have put Microsoft technologies at the heart of their products will also be at the EXPO. Emis, which is one of the country’s leading suppliers of GP and primary care systems, will be showing Emis Web and the medical interoperability gateway (MIG) that it has developed with rival INPS.
Emis Web turns information held by GPs into an electronic record that– with patient consent – can be shared with other healthcare professionals, while also giving them access to booking and other online applications. The MIG gives non-Emis system users access to Emis Web.
Emis will also be demonstrating ipatient, which, as its name suggests, gives patients access to the records and appointments information on Emis web, alongside other healthcare resources, such as leaflets, support and discussion groups.
“Healthcare can be very segmented,” says Emis managing director Sean Riddell. “People who work in secondary care may not know much about what is going on in primary care, and vice-versa. But healthcare is now being joined up; and this exhibition is a chance for us to show how technology can be used to help patients, wherever they are in the system.”
Meanwhile, the Learning Clinic will be demonstrating Vital Pac, a real-time, mobile information system developed to allow nursing and other medical staff to monitor vital signs at a patients’ bedside that is now being used for infection control and bed management as well.
And System C will be showing some of the early results of a new contract that it has won to develop Clinical Intelligence Systems – or dashboards, as they tend to be called. The dashboards – another commitment from the Darzi review – will enable managers and clinicians to see at a glance how their services are performing and where action might be needed.
“The products our partners will be showing are all about using information to enable more effective patient care and to engage patients in their care,” says Mr Treleaven.
“Of course, there is more to spreading innovation than simply showing people good ideas. But we hope the EXPO will show people who might not go to a healthcare IT event that there is some great technology around that could really help them.”
Find out more about the Innovation Expo by visiting its website: http://www.healthcareinnovationexpo.com, where there are reductions for early booking until 30 May.