Tags: J4Care

A Few Small Words On Some Big Changes

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161015Since we last spoke, we’ve been busy making some improvements and changes to the way that we work here.

That’s mainly what I want to talk about today, though I do have a personal message to end with.

So, what’s been happening?

As you will have seen from our announcement in July, we have created a new management structure to help us make the most of changing circumstances and new opportunities.

There are two elements to this. One half is about the organic changes we are experiencing as a company. SynApps has done amazingly well since we were founded in the early ‘Noughts.’ We have secured two important partnerships, with EMC and with Alfresco, who form the bedrock of all we do here. I would also like to shout-out to another tech partner we’ve done some great work with, J4Care.

Working with these partners has helped us enter a lot of markets where we’ve done some great work. But SynApps is growing – and we’re fast-becoming a mid-sized company.

To service customers as a mid-sized company means a lot more process than when you’re an SME. You have to have real core corporate disciplines in place.

That’s why I have stepped up, with the permission of the board, to become co-CEO.

My colleague James Paton shares the responsibility with me. James has great experience in introducing standards and procedures like the ISO 27001 systems and bedding in our new sales automation tool, Salesforce, and will look after this side of the business and the service side. We are putting a lot more science into our budgeting, forecasting and pipeline, in order to be a slicker, more professional partner for bigger organisations. I know James has some discussion on that front that we’ll be publishing here soon.

My main focus is going to be on strategy and seeing where we need to take the company next. James and I see both roles as equally vital, which is why they need to be at the same level.

A special thanks to a certain Mr Whitelaw

It’s an exciting and challenging time, then. We know we have a lot of work to do. But that’s for the best reason – opportunity. We are doing well in interesting markets that are seeing the potential for ECM for the first time. With EMC, Alfresco and J4Care at our side, we are winning excellent business – especially in areas like the NHS.

So – changing circumstances, both inside SynApps and in the market. But, the other half of that change is the decision of Jim Whitelaw to pass the baton to myself and James.

Jim’s done some amazing work and the company wouldn’t be the same without his leadership and contribution. He’s retiring at the end of 2015, and it’s going to be sad to see him go. Many of the systems and structures I have discussed Jim spotted the need for and he spurred us on this path.

So – Jim, can I say, on behalf of both James and the rest of the SynApps team, how grateful we are that you took on the role of leading us from the front for so long. You’ve put us in a great position. Now it’s time – working with our customers – to make all that come to fruition.

What a year! Here’s to a very busy Q4 – it’s going to be a real landmark for us.

Speak soon,

Mark Winstone
Joint CEO and Sales & Marketing Director
SynApps Solutions

Why Are Trusts Interested In Non-DICOM Solutions Right Now? A View From Industry Experts J4Care

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Img_blog49Let’s find out more about one of our most important technology partners here at SynApps Solutions, J4Care, whose global Marketing and Sales Director, Marcel Swennenhuis, shares his views on the non-DICOM aspect to the health IT market

Emerging customer demand around non-DICOM

Patient records are a combination of medication information, documents, reports, patient history – and also typically images, both DICOM images, e.g. radiology, as well as non-DICOM ones, which could be dermatology pictures or other pictures of a patient.

The problem is that all those types of content are spread over different systems and in different formats. For a doctor, that can be very frustrating, because to get a complete view of the patient he often has to go to different systems, to get to what he needs to know about a patient.

That is not ideal. Doctors are starting to say, ‘Just give me one way of looking at an entire patient record, including radiology images, cardiology, dermatology and medication!’ Because that is a lot easier, clearly. I hear from a lot of medics that they only have a few minutes to talk to a patient during a consultation – and if they have to log into three or four different systems, it’s unmanageable and they won’t do it. They have to ask the patient ‘Please tell me what kind of medication you are using,’ and ‘Can you bring me a CD with the back X-ray images’. Information should be simple to access and available, in one place. That is the marketplace demand we are seeing more and more of.

The curse of the silo

The reason we’re at this point: silos. Historically, each and every department in a hospital had their own ‘silo’ of information. They all had their own database with information that had to do with their specialisation.

There’s another IT aspect to this to consider. Hospital IT departments are buying more and more archives/storage from different vendors. They have to go to one particular company for storing their radiology data, then another for storing the cardiology information, then to another for storing the medication information etc.

The problem that results from that is that it is very difficult to keep everything in line. They would like to have just one system where everything is stored about a patient.

The good news is that with more modern systems, especially VNAs, we are getting to a more integrated view of the patient, driven by the doctors, who want everything together.

The 2018 paperless NHS target

In the UK, there has been a drive to create a unified patient record, and there is an NHS paperless target for 2018. What’s interesting is, this ambition is far from being a UK-one only – it’s European wide, although manifesting itself differently in different countries.

Finland has, for instance, said it wants one integral view of the patient, with everything digitised in a centralised way, so it is setting up one central system where all hospitals are required to send important data, then any other hospital or any GP can access it, even the patient. The goal is to get rid of paper and see the end of patients running around with CDs or documents if they visit another hospital.

In The Netherlands, they are also trying to digitise everything – however, here there is a completely non-centralised approach. Each hospital is individually aiming for digitisation, then connecting to all the other hospitals so that, with all kinds of protocols and security, each hospital can look into the data of the other.

Estonia is also following the Finnish centralised route – which we’re helping by implementing one integrated viewer for all images, across the country; we are also doing a project in the region around Johannesburg (South Africa), which is following a centralised approach for 30+ hospitals to share patient-data. In England it’s more of a semi-centralised approach, which is closer to the Dutch model.

Marcel Swennenhuis works at our core tech partner J4Care, an innovative software company that’s helping medical professionals, as well as patients, by enabling easy, safe and fast storage and access to complete medical records