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Reboot 2.7.2009

Hello and welcome to reboot, E-Health Insider’s look at the lighter side of life in healthcare technology. We’d love to see your own diary items, media spots and appointments news. All contributions gratefully received: email Lyn Whitfield.

E-Health Insider diary:

With the sun blazing down and the NHS on official heatwave alert, it’s undoubtedly summer. Which means that the review of NHS IT policy that the Conservatives commissioned from Dr Glyn Hayes should be published imminently. The reaction to the review may be as interesting as the report itself. This week, the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies published a paper on scrapping “the NHS database” and letting people sign up for Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault instead.

Conservative Party leader David Cameron has also been known to extol the virtue of personal health record platforms, arguing in April that they would “cost virtually nothing to run.” Someone is going to have to explain to Cameron that the NHS has sound legal and practical reasons for holding patient records. Someone else is going to have to explain that in the corporate world, a free platform isn’t, actually, you know, well, free. 

Wakey, wakey:

A few weeks ago, a press release was put out by Credant Technologies, claiming that “a quarter of UK employees are so work obsessed that they can’t resist using a mobile device such as a laptop in bed” (and extolling the merits of its endpoint solutions as a way of tackling the resulting security risks, naturally). A “survey of city workers” conducted for the company found 57% were spending between two and six hours working in bed every week, and that most of their partners found this “a very annoying habit.”

Nobody in the EHI office thought too much about this, until one of our reporters got talking to the IT director of a major acute trust. At the end of the interview, he had a little request. Could EHI retime its weekly newsletter, so it didn’t arrive at just after midnight every Friday? The reason, it woke him up… presumably by triggering a bleep on his PDA. The arrival time of the newsletter is out of our hands. But it just goes to show you people really do sleep with these things to hand. Although the man in charge of the IT that supports an organisation that cares for hundreds of people probably has more reason to do so than your average city worker.

From the archives:

Five years ago on E-Health Insider:

The National Programme for IT in the NHS ramped up its communication effort with a new website complete with a “your say” function – but only briefly. Newsletter 130 reported that the spot, “where a public discussion forum had been planned”, was removed shortly after it appeared. “A placeholder for the page for the ‘your say’ forum originally read: ‘a discussion forum, for the sharing of experiences and opinions, will be made available shortly’,” it added. “It was available on the front of the website and the sidebar menu on 29 June, but the page was delinked and replaced with a ‘contact us’ email form the following day.”

One year ago on E-Health Insider:

EMIS, INPS and Adastra announced they were to work together on an integrated IT system to support the aims of Lord Darzi’s Next Stage Review of the NHS. Lord Darzi published his final report, giving a major role to patient choice and information to support higher quality services. An NHS manager was suspended for leaving a laptop containing the unencrypted records of 20,000 patients in his car while he went on holiday, from where it was stolen.

You, the reader:

The big news last week was that the head of NHS Connecting for Health, Martin Bellamy, was off to the Cabinet Office to “stick his head in the G-Cloud” as one commenter put it. And that the future of NHS Connecting for Health itself was in doubt, as many of its functions transferred to the Department of Health’s Informatics Directorate. Director general of informatics Christine Connelly told E-Health Insider that she was wondering whether to retain the name. If last week’s poll is anything to go on, she doesn’t need to wonder long. Readers voted 70% to 30% against CfH being a brand worth keeping. The poll also had an unusually low turn-out, suggesting that many readers weren’t interested (and weren’t prepared to support it, either).

Movers and shakers:

Have you made a recent appointment that would be of interest to our readers? Or have you recently moved jobs yourself? Let EHI know by emailing us here.