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SynApps Applauds New IT Trade Body’s Demands For Better Information Governance In The UK Public Sector

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Tony Backhouse 27f8d29By Tony Backhouse, Head of Healthcare Practice, SynApps Solutions

As we all settle down to the next five years of our new government, now is the time to start a debate about the best way to help deliver the most effective public services.

Technology is often pushed to the top of the queue when it comes to transforming public services, as we all know. Critics tend to respond that technology is often used an alternative to increased investment.

They may well have a point, and after five years of austerity, many public sector leaders wonder if there’s any ‘fat’ left to cut before we get to real flesh and bone. But in the NHS, there is a clear response, in the form of the seminal ‘Five Year Forward View’, to this question: we need more money and we need creative, intelligent use of digital solutions, too.

Here at SynApps, we know from our work on Vendor Neutral Archiving and Open Source clinical content solutions that stakeholders are increasingly convinced that smart technology is an invaluable tool in their hands.

A new call we can all get behind

However, one big barrier remains. It’s not a functionality problem. We have great technology already.

What we are missing is a common, easy way for those technologies – at all levels, between all sorts of partner organisations and teams in health, social and community care – to work together.

What’s holding us back: silos. silos of information, the way we have sectioned up data and patient information resources in ways that make it impossible to connect up the way we want.

That’s why we are throwing our support behind the call by the new pressure group of vendors behind networking technologies in the public sector, Innopsis for more effective, safer information sharing across the public sector.

The body, which launched last week after a re-branding from its previous identity as PSNGB, says that what the heads of major Departments like Health and DWP should be doing is taking on board the potential to transform public services by better enabling organisations to safely share more information – something it sees as a “huge, largely untapped opportunity” for UK Plc.

The evidence is mounting up at the coalface

Who can disagree with its further point that if public sector organisations could safely share information, for example across multi-agency safeguarding hubs, which could form a single point of contact to report safeguarding concerns, we can make real progress here.

Progress and savings, too. This is not just Innopsis’ conviction but that of many experienced leaders in both the buyer and commercial community around the NHS. And it’s ours based on the real savings we can see our Trust customers achieving every day.

Let’s hope Whitehall listens to Innopsis, our customers and the larger community at this formative time – as the next five years could be a lot more successful and productive as a result.

The NHS Is Getting Interested In Open Source: And That’s A Good Thing

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By Jean van Vuuren, Head of Healthcare UK & Ireland, Alfresco Software

We’re delighted to hear this week from an important partner of ours, Alfresco, which has been doing some very interesting work with the NHS around Open Source – work that’s now evolving into some great VNA developments.

I am delighted to be able to talk to the SynApps community. We see SynApps as one of our most significant implementation partners, so this is a great way to acknowledge that, but also to discuss how we’re making great progress together in a very important market.

That market is the NHS, and together we’ve just built the first UK Open Source VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive) medical data system – based on Alfresco’s award-winning technology together with some functionality from J4Care, and brought to market via SynApps’ integration and professional skills and resources. (Please go here https://www.synapps-solutions.com/vna to find out more.)

Why is this a significant development? I can answer the question in three ways: 1, the Open Source angle, 2, the NHS market view and 3, the VNA aspect.

The Open Source angle first. Here I think it’s worth spending a few moments clearing up some mistaken assumptions about Open Source.

First off, Open Source is not free. That isn’t its value or the source of its attraction. Alfresco is an Open Source company that sells to the enterprise. Like all enterprise-facing Open Source vendors, we don’t offer non-cost products, but instead, we offer a free community version of our solution, plus a paid-for, commercially supported and scalable one. What makes it ‘Open Source’ is that with both you have access to the code – and you can see exactly how things get done. Most users of Open Source clinical lead production systems will select a commercially supported release as it is fully supported and fully tested by the vendor. This reduces any clinical risk of running an unsupported and untested platform. At the same time, ‘Open’ really does mean that – Alfresco is all about open standards so as to encourage the most interoperability and sharing of functionality we can. It’s an approach that NHS organisations have already picked up on, even before this VNA work, like a project at Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust. So the first reason I think, that this VNA work we’re doing together is important, is it shows the power of Open Source as an approach in itself.

The days of NHS IT ‘vendor lock-in’ are over

Which brings me to the second point – the NHS and Open Source. The NHS, as it moves on from the National Programme for IT, is becoming more interested in Open Source as a resource. In fact, we’ve been in close contact with the internal team at NHS England that is working with Trust CCIOS (Chief Clinical Information Officers, the heads of IT for many health institutions) (see here to encourage local autonomy and more innovative approaches to sourcing IT, now the days of big contracts are drawing to a close. NHS England is trying to encourage local purchasing and IT decision-making, and it is convinced that Open Source is of great importance in that regard. A key driver is openness and choice – the NHS doesn’t want to have to deal with any kind of vendor lock-in. Open means that NHS developers can adapt code and play with systems in a way that suits them, not the vendor, in other words, which is also seen as a big bonus by NHS England leadership. So, the second reason I think it’s important that Alfresco and SynApps are coming together with a medical solution that is Open Source is that it’s at a time when the NHS is really starting to be open to the possibilities that entails.

And the third reason we are interested in this partnership between ourselves, SynApps and J4Care are the same reasons SynApps has been promoting a VNA and Document Management approach; there is just so much that NHS Trusts can do with this form of data management! VNAs are swiftly emerging as the best way for organisations to not just store and easily access (in a safe and secure manner) important patient images, but also all the associated clinical information that clinicians want to see online – that single electronic patient record ideal that never really came out of the National Programme, but which we all see as key to the ‘paperless NHS’ model the Secretary of State said he wants in place by 2018.

Three powerful reasons, I hope you agree, on why this first NHS Open Source VNA is worthy of your attention. We’re really excited about this, and hope you are too.

SynApps, Alfresco and J4Care will be revealing more about their new Open Source VNA solution at launch event for the Open Source VNA solution on March 26 (1.30 – 4.30 pm) at the Park Plaza Hotel, Leeds, LS1 5NS.
http://www.alfresco.com/events/open-source-vna-launch

ConxAudit Will Give You a Whole New Management Dashboard You Didn’t Know You Could Have

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By Paul Edwards, Co-Founder & Product Manager, SynApps Solutions

Last time we spoke, I started to explain about the problem audit trail users can have with Enterprise Content Management systems; how they do a very useful job, but can get ‘clogged up’ over time, as they record so much data that gets pushed into a database in a way that often makes it hard to work with, plus starts to impair the performance of the overall system – as it often comprises millions of tables after a year or two of serious enterprise use.

Hence our release this quarter of a new addition to the ConXApps) family of products; ConXAudit, which takes that growing audit trail data pile and turns it into a highly indexed form that is not only a lot easier to work with (especially via our graphical front end, which makes it really simple to interrogate the audit log to see who did what with which document) but also removes the audit database’s drag on the ECM (be it Documentum or Alfresco) in terms of overall daily performance.

Another benefit of porting your ECM audit trail to ConXAudit is that it will make it a lot, lot quicker to restore the system should you ever need to – or, indeed, move your work to a different ECM platform, when and if you should need to do that.

I also mentioned that we are helping an early ConXAudit customer work though the issues their huge – 65 million row! – audit database is giving them. That customer is a major transport facility that wants to upgrade to the latest version of its chosen ECM, but which was worried this audit data issue would complicate this process (or not allow it to keep all of the data it really needed, which is a potential compliance headache further down the road).

The great news is that that issue has gone away. Another benefit is that the team says that the amount of time needed to work with audit data has dropped, quite dramatically, since it moved the data into ConXAudit.

That’s because of the wide range of data presentation formats that the app offers, from pie charts and other sorts of statistical analysis tools; you are getting a whole new dashboard piping important usage and security information to you that you would have struggled to get before. And in the case of this early customer work with ConXAudit audit, the team there has told us it actually intends one large display in the support office with a rolling dashboard view displaying system usage as a way of promoting the value of the ECM platform internally.

So, as you can probably tell, I am really excited by ConXAudit, as it solves a problem in convincing ways that will genuinely help ECM users.

Find out more about ConXAudit here, and contact the SynApps ConX team today to start streamlining your ECM audit trail.

ConXAudit: A Powerful Way to Deal with ECM Audit Trail ‘Clog’

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By Paul Edwards, Co-Founder & Product Manager, SynApps Solutions UK

It’s a great pleasure for me to talk to you, as this is the first blog I’ve written for the SynApps site.

In case you don’t recognise the name, I am one of the six original founders of what recently became an 11 year old company! As I have done from the start, I concentrate on the technical side of things, even from time to time writing some code.

Which is what I want to talk to you about today: some code that we have helped produce, based on talking to customers. I think it’s a system that is going to be of interest and relevance to a lot of people, certainly anyone who’s running the kind of big ECM platforms we work with, EMC Documentum or Alfresco.

The system that’s emerged from these conversations is one that addresses a big issue that many ECM users have struggled with for some time, but never had a way of dealing with; audit trail clog – which is why we have called the product ConXAudit.

Let me explain a bit more about what I mean by ‘audit trail clog.’ Most modern ECM suites of any reputation come with a built in audit trail feature; in practical terms, this is a facility for capturing who has done what on the system at any one time. You will typically want to record who has accessed a document, who checked it out, which team made comments (or didn’t), be sure a certain individual really did read that health and safety update for our compliance records and so on.

So, useful. Which is why most customers turn it on. But the trail builds and builds, as more use is made of the system. In tech terms, you have a database that is growing and growing – until it has, if you are an enterprise user of an ECM platform, millions and millions of rows in it.

That isn’t an exaggeration. One of the first customers of ConXAudit is a major transport entity which has been using Documentum for a few years (and finding it a mission-critical, highly useful system). We’ve been in to help them manage their audit trail its audit log is 65 million rows.

A database that large presents you with two problems. One, it’s inherently difficult to navigate and intelligently interrogate – which takes away the point of having an audit trail, honestly. And two, it acts as a major brake on the overall performance of the main ECM; it’s an invisible anchor on the system, degrading its capacity to do the work you bought it for.

Let your ECM do the work it’s supposed to!

So we have launched ConXAudit to help deal with those two specific issues – the lack of functionality a big, unwieldy audit log gives you and the invisible drag issue. What ConXAudit does is export all of the data into its own index. That has two immediate effects: one, it makes it a lot easier to work with and query; two, it lifts out that big bit of metal holding down the engine of the big ECM, letting you get on with the job at hand. And, of course, it also continues to do what you needed it for in the first place – auditing!

We’ve also worked hard on a key feature of the product – its highly graphical, easy-to-use interface. That’s a front end that means all that exported audit data is made accessible to you and your team in a highly intuitive way, so you have mouse-click driven ways of checking all your audit knowledge base via a range of powerful statistical analysis and graphing tools.

That’s a much easier way of managing and working with this asset than building SQL queries and offers you the best use of that data for checking or report building. In fact, customers are telling us that the graphical analytics capability is one of the major attractions of the product because of the wide range of data presentation formats that the app offers, from pie charts on.

To sum up, I really think ConXAudit is going to be a lot of use to ECM users out there who want to get rid of that audit trail clog issue.

Find out more about ConXAudit here, and contact the SynApps ConX team today to start streamlining your ECM audit trail.

 

 

Another Key Year For ECM – And Synapps – Is Starting

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Mark Winstone gets out his crystal ball to try and see what 2015 looks like delivering for both NHS and other Enterprise Content Management customers

January is a natural time of year for reflecting briefly on what 2015 looks like shaping up to be.

Here at SynApps Solutions, the answer is ‘a pretty good one!’ We are going into 2015 after a strong 12 months. In particular, 2014 was a very strong year for us in the UK healthcare market. This was due to our work in the first part of the year around our Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA), which has now evolved into our new Clinical Content Store.

Some really significant customer wins are starting to come through on this, like our project at Northampton General Hospital (https://www.synapps-solutions.com/news/northampton-general-hospital-chooses-a-synapps-vendor-neutral-archive-content-store), more of which we will be sharing with you soon and which will be the basis for very strong growth in the months ahead for us. Which is great for us, sure – but the real significance of VNA/CCS is the way it’s starting to help NHS Trusts start to work together and start properly (and securely) sharing patient data at long last.

No wonder, then, that I and the rest of the SynApps team think our 2015 healthcare ‘story’ is going to be all about expanding our footprint in the Vendor Neutral Archive space – both with our existing and new customers, starting with conversations around the entry level VNA and then the Clinical Content Store. That’s because we see enormous potential in potentially retiring legacy systems that they have and transferring the real ‘gold dust’ into the Store.

We are also very much aligned, meanwhile, with the overall NHS mission of going paperless by 2015 (http://digitalchallenge.dh.gov.uk). That drive from central government is making budget available and allowing Clinical Chief Information Officers in the NHS to finally start investing in VNA-style platform implementations as opposed to print solutions, as the market finally moves on from the National Programme (for all of its many positives, it really is time to start thinking beyond it now). Oh, and one more thing we are really excited about, the development of Open Source ECM solutions especially for those areas of the NHS that have been neglected until recently.

Let’s conclude on the public sector side of things for now with a quick set of thoughts on cloud. We are getting a lot of interest outside the NHS as regards cloud-delivered ECM. (In the NHS, there are applications such as the personal health record which do lend themselves to more of a cloud-based application, but our take on that is that security concerns will tend to push managers to more of a ‘hybrid’ approach.) But we do have to express a bit of caution about any expectations that 2015 will be a massive year for G-Cloud (or what we must all now start calling the Government Digital Marketplace (https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk). What we are finding as a long-term G-Cloud support and supplier is that G-Cloud seems to be more for commodity items buying and not for more configurable solutions. We are very happy with the CloudStore but, as it stands at least, expect to get more business with the UK public sector via the other buying frameworks out there as they tend to be more applicable to the kind of configurable solution we as a company tend to sell.

What do I mean by configurable? G-Cloud is great for when you say, ‘I want to buy an HR personnel records management solution for x pounds per month,’ you buy it, the functionality is fixed, it does what it says on the tin. The reality is, though, certainly with enterprise content management, that pretty much every customer we work with doesn’t want that – they want their ECM to be configured to work in line with how their specific business works. So for 2015 at least, we don’t think there will be a lot of content management procurement that will go through the Marketplace.

A move to platform ECM?

Healthcare was a very important area for us already, but the growth of acceptance of our VNA approach to helping hospitals deal with patient imagery and data is putting it ever-higher in our business mix; I would say probably 40 to 50% of our activity in 2015 as a company will be in healthcare, in fact.

But that doesn’t mean that our other corporate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) work is getting de-prioritised; far from it! We are going great guns with our key partners of EMC and Alfresco in promoting content management in all sorts of markets. Our business is about providing content management solutions, with healthcare as just one face of that.

What of that market, though – the wider content management one? It’s going to be another good year for ECM, we predict. For one, it is still very much a growth market and a growing business. In terms of other drivers, 2015 will see ECM become more and more about mobile access, we think – about being able to get your content management on the go/wherever the business needs it, there is quite a push in that direction in the marketplace. We are also definitely starting to hear more from our customers about a general move towards hosted solutions and many more ‘all cloud’ solutions, too.

What’s behind that shift: businesses are much keener on platform solution these days. Or rather, whereas at one time we used to see ECM as all about one application or project, now it’s much more about creating a more sustainable, long-term environment for important information. Just before Christmas, for example, I spoke to a manufacturing company who see their 2015 mission as about getting proper control of what they call their ‘crown jewel’ documents – documents that contain the ‘secret recipes’ for the most profitable products they offer – but who are simultaneously looking at content management as a platform for their organisation over a long period of time. In terms of crystal ball gazing, I expect to have a lot of similar conversations in the next 12 months.

Well, there you have it – our view on what we expect to see for us as a company in 2015 in the health and wider ECM sectors. Can I take this opportunity to wish you all the very best in this bright New Year!

Drive up Care Through Sharing Information – A Patient Centric Approach To Viewing All Medical Information

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By Tony Backhouse, Business Development Manager – Healthcare Division, SynApps Solutions

Last time I talked a bit about the business drivers for NHS IT leaders in terms of bringing together both the structured and unstructured data. I then moved the discussion on to look at how our new Clinical Content Store can (and does) address those issues and help you, as a Trust IT leader, with those challenges.

I want to spend some time talking in a bit more detail about the specifics of the Store and what we are currently offering.

In these past few posts, we have been discussing NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens’ visionary ‘Five Year Forward View’ where he calls for more collaborative, patient-centred care, and access to more and more information to establish a complete picture of a patient’s health.

That’s a movement that’s happening not just at the departmental or even at the hospital-wide level, but beyond it, as different healthcare providers and, soon, social care and other stakeholders including patients themselves, seek to share patient insights to improve care across time and across more than one clinical context.

The SynApps Solutions approach to clinical content management is going to play a key role in addressing that – as it will allow all sorts of healthcare organisations to create a comprehensive, patient-centric view across all current organisational boundaries, irrespective of the content’s format or origin. The aim, at least at national, political level, is to finally get the true EPR happening (sorry but we don’t believe that the mega-suite is the answer to all our EPR prayers) and to becoming a ‘paperless NHS’ (http://digitalchallenge.dh.gov.uk ).

The problem is that this is happening in a time of financial constraint. Indeed, an immediate problem is the end of a lot of old Programme radiology, PACS and EPR contracts. Which means Trusts really have to get on top of what the systems of the future need to be to manage and share the Complete Patient Record.  And to do that they need to take a new approach to the management of all of this information.

So hospitals have to think about what could be the most cost-effective way to migrate back existing imaging data to new platforms while simultaneously ensuring that data remains intact, available and free from vendor lock-in. And as you may know, a popular approach to this challenge has been to consolidate multi-department PACS silos into a vendor neutral archive (VNA), as this offers Trusts an opportunity to consolidate imaging demands into a single repository, using agreed standards to ensure easy data retrieval out again.

The SynApps Clinical Content Storecan do all that, as it has a huge VNA component – but a lot more. A strong claim? Well, how about having a really powerful VNA with the added benefit of market-leading enterprise content management capabilities? What that means is the ability to perform powerful clinical content sharing, storing and management at the top level. That’s to say, not just all the relevant medical images but all the digitised or electronic clinical info too – in one place – which means it immediately enables a fully working EPR. From paper notes to digital images, from hand drawn pictures to Medical Photography, from locked away structured data to video and audio clips.

We are very excited about what CCS means for both SynApps and the market. Please drop us a line so we can continue the discussion.

We are currently offering a free consultative study to scope out the potential of CCS to meet your need, but be aware it is time-limited – so start talking to us today!

Please – take advantage of the seminar [https://www.synapps-solutions.com/events/addressing-the-twin-challenges-of-retiring-applications-while-increasing-access-to-patient-information] on Thursday 29th January at 12.30pm at the London Chamber of Commerce, EC4R 1AR, and find out more about the Clinical Content Store and how it can help you meet your EPR challenge.

 

 

 

Buying an EPR System Won’t Save the NHS

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By Tony Backhouse, Business Development Manager – Healthcare Division, SynApps Solutions

Last time we spoke, I started explaining why SynApps has expanded the functionality of our pioneering VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive), our system to help hospitals better handle their digital information (see ‘Saving the NHS – Let’s Start with Local Health IT’).

I also put that work in the context of recent NHS thinking on the central place of localised, useful health IT systems and how those local systems can be built from the ground up. This time, I want to put a bit more context around what we’ve done with VNA.

A term that I need to wheel out again to get us started is the EPR – the Electronic Patient Record. I hesitate a bit as the term has so much legacy, not all of it good, in the NHS (thinking about the National Programme for IT, of course – which failed to deliver a national EPR, despite all our best efforts.  The thing is, the concept of Electronic Patient Records is still a really good idea. It would be fantastic to centrally store, but easily access, your patient history and data wherever you needed it.

That’s especially true as we start to use more and more digital information and images in the NHS. Think about radiology images, MRI scans, output from an echocardiogram – they really all should be available in a true EPR. Plus there are lots of reasons clinicians might want to take pictures of you too, to record a specific injury on the night you were brought into A&E, or the progress of a bedsore.  Those images could be virtually and securely attached to all those images in your digital, e-patient folder.

So back to the true EPR. This is where it gets a bit complicated, as information in EPR Systems have structured, electronic file data that’s not that hard to store and work with (and there are some systems out there described as ‘EPRs’ which are okay at what they do). What about all the unstructured data, though? That’s the Images we have talked about, the GP notes, the letter or email he or she sent to your specialist two years ago – there’s a lot of information we’d like to collate and keep with you on that patient journey you’re making through the NHS, across your lifetime.

The reality is that a proper EPR is going to have to be able to manage huge amounts of both structured and unstructured, document and paper-based content. Most experts agree the ratio between unstructured (GP letter etc. digital image or sound file) data and structured is in the order or 80:20 – that’s to say, 80% is unstructured.

How does this connect back with what we have been doing at SynApps Solutions? Well, what we had with our great VNA archive was a brilliant way of helping you handle part of that 80% – the images from you PACS, RIS and Ophthalmology systems as well as those poorly filed Medical Photography files. But we needed to give you more. And that’s what the Clinical Content Store (CCS) offers – a way to deal with the rest of the 80%, the unstructured ‘eight tenths of the iceberg’ of that patient content you want to be able to work with as well as the inactive part of the 20% that is either Read Only or locked in departmental systems.

To do that, you’d really like to be to offer both a VNA and a proper clinical archive, an intelligent repository that will offer a way to access all the data you need, importantly, in tandem with your EPR System. You can work with that data in your team, by the way – but it will also allow it to be worked on by other organisations, giving the social care team, as well as other hospitals and primary care or mental health institutions that act as stations on that (lifelong) patient journey, access.

Best of, well, multiple worlds?

The great news is that the CCS pulls all this together. One, it helps you manage all your Read Only data. Two, it gives you a repository to start working with all your unstructured information, too.

But what is really exciting is that it goes beyond what an EPR currently does and links together all that great new content in a patient centric view for sharing both in and out of your hospital.

Just one extra data point to get you excited about CCS; one hospital that we work with is telling us that by using our system is going to save them at least one million pounds a year in not having to directly work with such legacy systems any more.

Maybe now you can see why I and the rest of the SynApps healthcare team are so excited about the Clinical Content Store and what we know it can do for Trusts.

Which is, building out of the EPR – but in a new way of working with all your patient data, in a way that doesn’t force you to compromise.

Now that is exciting!

We are currently offering a free consultative study to scope out the potential of CCS to meet your need, but be aware it is time-limited – so start talking to us today!

Please – take advantage of the seminar [https://www.synapps-solutions.com/events/addressing-the-twin-challenges-of-retiring-applications-while-increasing-access-to-patient-information] on Thursday 29th January at 12.30pm at the London Chamber of Commerce, EC4R 1AR, and find out more about the Clinical Content Store and how it can help you meet your EPR challenge.