What happens next? Looking ahead to 2009

The newspapers may be full of doom and gloom about the economy, but members of the Microsoft UK healthcare team and our healthcare partners are surprisingly upbeat about the prospects for NHS IT. Improved efficiency, a new interest in virtualisation and new services for patients are predicted for 2009; along with a starring role for Wales. Paul Curran also picks up some resolutions for NHS IT managers.

John Coulthard, director of healthcare, Microsoft UK: Will we be hunkering down and hoping that the chill blast of the recession is no worse than the chill blast of winter? Or will we - as I suspect - be working harder, faster and smarter to keep up? 

My tip for 2009 is relevance. In healthcare, as in other areas of their lives, people increasingly want relevant searches, relevant websites, relevant content - relevant to their jobs, their roles and their families. The right stuff at the right time in the right way. Those that do the relevant thing in 2009 will win.

Brian Painting, business manager, Microsoft UK Healthcare: Hats off to the Welsh NHS, whose Clinical Portal will be rolled out next year! Huge amounts of hard work will surely be greeted by gasps of amazement from IT colleagues in England. Based on one of our most powerful tools, SharePoint, and just like the Common User Interface Programme, it’s a remarkable display of what NHS developers can achieve when they engage with clinicians.

My New Year’s message to NHS colleagues is this; you’ve got the tools you need in the Enterprise Agreement. By asking your clinicians what they need to improve their work, you can build something really effective. By using tools like SharePoint to automate processes, I also predict that trusts up and down the country will be able to ride the credit crunch and save heaps of money in 2009.

Brian Dunleavy, NHS business manager, Eurodata Systems: With the credit squeeze upon us, it’s more crucial than ever that IT delivers tangible business benefits. I’d like everyone in the NHS to become more aware of what they can achieve using the technologies at their disposal in areas such as unified communications and remote access, where solutions like Microsoft Exchange and the Intelligent Application Gateway can be catalysts for change and make a huge difference to their way of working.

I’d also like to see trusts making greater use of the technologies available in the Enterprise Agreement to improve patient care and extend services out into the community securely and efficiently. If you want to know what next year holds, register for All you need to know about Microsoft for 2009 on 30 January, where we’ll be discussing Exchange 2007, unified messaging, virtualisation, Windows Server 2008 and much more.

Richard Lane, Microsoft NHS technology strategist: I predict that virtualisation will be the star performer on the Microsoft platform next year. By consolidating their servers, trusts will begin to realise huge savings around the ‘green’ IT agenda, while continuing to provide excellent services to clinicians and other healthcare staff.

The uptake of Windows Server 2008 and the availability of Hyper-V will mean reduced costs - thanks to lower hardware, energy and management overhead – and create an even more dynamic IT infrastructure within NHS organisations. What’s more, technologies like System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will allow trusts to move workloads dynamically between servers and make more intelligent use of IT resources. In short, I believe 2009 will usher in a whole new approach to deploying technology.   

Neil Slater, Microsoft enterprise strategy consultant and NHS CUI IM&T Tools Project lead: My Christmas wish is for every IM&T manager in the NHS to be aware of the IM&T Tools, so that when they’re planning a project they can check for Microsoft-written, NHS-specific guidance to give them a great starting point.

For 2009, I’d also say: use the NHS Microsoft Deployment Toolkit - not because it’s cool, but because it reduces the time taken to refresh an image from half a day to 20 minutes; and upgrade to Windows Vista - not because it’s got a snazzy user interface, but because it’ll reduce the number of images that need to be maintained and save two days a month. Finally, I predict that in 2009 I’ll continue to embarrass my kids by using words like ‘snazzy’ in public!

Daniel Wakefield, sales director at Microsoft partner 21C: The media may be saying it’s a bleak midwinter, but within many of the innovative NHS organisations that we’ve been working with lately, the picture is anything but bleak. On the contrary, the use of clinical dashboards and the increasing adoption of digital technologies by healthcare staff indicates a marked change in attitudes towards the benefits of IT for patient care.

Healthcare professionals are beginning to acknowledge that the pressures placed on them can be greatly relieved by deploying innovative technology solutions. At the same time, IT managers right across the NHS are now looking to do things differently. That’s why I believe we’ll see some tremendous progress in 2009.  

Danielle Still, healthcare business manager, Microsoft UK: Christmas is a time when our thoughts turn to those who are ill in hospital. It’s a reminder that everything we do is meant to improve outcomes for patients. It’s also a reminder to consider ways of using technology to improve their stay and contribute to the all-important family support network.

For instance, why not have Xbox-style consoles in children’s wards so they can play with other youngsters; why not make MSN messaging available from their bedsides, so they can communicate with their family and friends in the outside world - just like they would at home? The technologies required to provide these little pleasures cost-effectively are readily available within the Enterprise Agreement. So my hope for 2009 is that we put more thought into finding simple ways of making life more pleasant for patients and their families.    

Microsoft UK’s healthcare team and our partners wish you a happy and healthy 2009. May your troubles last only as long as your New Year's resolutions!