Tags: NHS

Read About The Next Chapter In ConXPhoto’s Evolution

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16th December, 2015 – Our latest blog post discusses the next step in ConXPhoto’s development.

The system, introduced last year and already a hit with NHS Trusts, is being extended to become ConXMedia. Why? Because our hospital customers wanted to extend the system to manage other media than still photography images, like videos and other imagery.

There’s great potential in offering an easy and reliable way for hospital administrators and clinicians alike of having a control panel to work with all the multiple forms of images, for both patient care and compliance/audit trail use cases.

Look for more details and specifics about ConXMedia on the site soon – and read more about what’s coming in the blog post itself, here

The Helping Hand of XDS

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Standards for document sharing will be a huge help for an NHS trying to beat its dependence on paper

Tony Backhouse, head of SynApps Solutions’ Health Practice, believes standards for document sharing will be a huge help for an NHS trying to beat its dependence on paper.

A key goal of the NHS: be digital – ‘paperless’ – by 2018. That much is certain. However, what is often not appreciated is how far we are from achieving it – as the NHS is still very reliant paper.

As it stands, even in 2015, paper-based medical records still have travel between hospital departments, following the patient. It’s an expensive and cumbersome way to manage this information, even if it’s the approach we’ve always used. In order to meet the challenge, hospitals are implementing electronic document management or records management systems in order to manage their information digitally, and make it available for both the clinician and the patient at the point of care.

The challenge is formidable – in particular, providing access to this electronic content beyond the Trust, which is the next step hospitals are going to have to take if they are serious about moving to integrate health and social care at anything more than a trivial level.

Read the full article published in 24NBiz here

Will Open Source Prove Crucial In The Move To Five Year Forward View?

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Ben_Goldacre_TAM_London_2009_(2)Technology is acknowledged as being crucial to the salvation of the NHS – a fact acknowledged by NHS England’s leadership, most recently in its 2014-15 Annual Report, where it is stated that better use of data and technology has the power to “improve choice and outcomes for patients, allow them to take more control, reduce the burden on front-line staff, increase accountability and support the NHS as an engine of science and economic growth”.

It’s regrettable, then, that we are still hitting NHS technology roadblocks. I refer to the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES), whose cost rose from £14m to over £40m with only NHS England so far able to use it.

However, it’s less useful to criticise this particular project than it is to look for new ways of doing Health IT better.

An important clue in the discussion of GPES was there. Listen to well-known, medical sector commentator Ben Goldacre, who posted this statement on the GPES row: “[This is why] we need open APIs, open data, open source, shared mapping ontologies &c to permit innovation AND inter-operability”.

Why are people like Goldacre talking about open data and open APIs? A growing number of NHS Health IT experts – including NHS England itself, as well as commentators like Goldacre – see incredible potential in de-risking IT projects by accessing the power and scope of a wider, supportive Open Source community.

‘All kind of vendor tricks’

Those are important stakeholders to get behind Open Source. Much more important ones are actual practitioners – front-line NHS IT leaders who are using Open Source. We have worked with many, as our Clinical Content Store has an Open Source option.

Take just one example – an Integrated Care Trust in the North of England whose CIO told an audience of NHS health leaders and other HIT (Health IT) stakeholders recently why she was so attracted to the idea: “The entire marketplace that comes through our door is the commercialised EPRs – the big American vendors, trying to get our time and trying to sell us the big Americanised products. They do have a lot of ‘pulling power’ and work very hard to get you to buy their products,” she says.

The problem is, the situation is much more complicated at the coalface – and she needs more flexibility and a wider range of options to deal with the reality she sees than is on offer, basically. “We have got about 300 systems in my organisation alone, because it is made up of several previous Trusts and organisations put together, so I have a whole set of systems to deal with,” she says. “And you see all kinds of tricks from vendors who don’t work in Open Systems who try to make sure you can’t get to the data. We all need in the NHS to abstract data from applications so that we don’t have that situation any more.”

She contrasts this situation with the Open Source alternative, as she sees it: “I can put my clinicians into a product community; we can help steer it – indeed, it is really up to us to make it go somewhere – It is slightly lazy always selecting a safe vendor (but knowing you’re paying over the odds for that ‘safety’) as opposed to contributing to a community where you are steering the product. I also think there are many advantages in the longer term in this kind of shared product development.”

But perhaps the single statement that shows why people from Goldacre to NHS CCIOs are right is summed up by her last remark to the audience about all this: “I just can’t tolerate vendor lock-in any more.”

Is it time to look at Open Source as a way to avoid many of the problems of older style technology delivery? I think it is. Of course, it’s not a silver bullet and won’t solve all your problems overnight – this is real life, after all.

But to get to the kind of NHS Simon Stevens envisages, I suspect Open Source is going to play a much bigger part than any of us can imagine right now. What do you think?

Tony Backhouse

Head, SynApps Healthcare Practice UK Team

SynApps Creates New Joint CEO Leadership Team To Spearhead Next Phase Of Growth

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Mark Winstone and James Paton will work together to take the content management leader forward from July

Maidenhead, UK, 8 July, 2015 – Content management leader SynApps Solutions has today announced that Mark Winstone and James Paton, currently Sales & Marketing Director and Customer Services Director respectively, are to forge a new partnership as joint Chief Executives of the growing UK software firm.

Winstone and Paton will assume their new leadership roles later this month – succeeding company co-founder and past CEO Jim Whitelaw, who will retire at the end of 2015 but who will take up, in the interim, a special role as Associate to provide advice, guidance and support to the new management team during a short transition phase.

The Maidenhead-based firm, which employs 35 people, has been a content management leader for some years, since its formation at the start of the Millennium by former UK EMC Documentum senior executives.

The firm has built a strong base for leading-edge content management solutions based on technology from leaders like EMC and Alfresco, but has recently expanded into the growing Health IT space in the form of a dedicated Healthcare Practice in response to the strong demand for its services in that market; in the past six months alone, four major English NHS Trusts have committed to work with SynApps.

“I am honoured to have been elected as SynApps Joint CEO,” commented Winstone. “It is a privilege to run an organisation that delivers high quality services and innovative solutions to clients,” he added.

“I share the sense of honour, and look forward to making a positive and meaningful impact for SynApps customers,” added his leadership colleague Paton.

The new leadership appointments coincide with the company’s decision to move away from the Director titles and embrace a more internationally-standardised CxO nomenclature.

A great next phase

“I can think of no team better to lead us into the next phase of our expansion,” Whitelaw said. “Mark’s experience as Director of Sales and Marketing here for 11 years, combined with his 25-year career spanning managerial roles at EMC and Cimage and other content management specialists make him a great executive, while James’s track record of success as Customer Services Director for 7 years combined with his years delivering transformational enterprise content management solutions at firms like EMC makes him another fantastic appointment to the top table.”

Further management strengthening is expected at the firm, given its solid pipeline and burgeoning opportunities in markets like the NHS.

About SynApps

SynApps is an independent services and solutions company specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. Founded in 2003 by former Documentum services professionals, the company provides consultancy, implementation and support services for EMC Documentum, and has authored a suite of content integration solutions, ConXApps, that allow businesses to quickly maximise their investment in ECM technologies. Organisations across healthcare, government and commercial markets rely on SynApps solutions and services to capture and share knowledge more dynamically and efficiently.

Find out more at synapps-solutions.com, or follow the firm on Twitter @Synappssol

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.

Croydon Health Services NHS Trust Chooses New Content And Imaging Solution As Stepping Stone To Going Fully Paperless

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– Croydon Health Services NHS Trust becomes the latest health service institution to use a standards-based way to extend its PACS database as a route to meeting its ‘Paperless NHS by 2018’ target –

Maidenhead, UK, 13 May, 2015 – Croydon Health Services NHS Trust has purchased a Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) content platform from content management leader SynApps Solutions to store patient X-ray images as it migrates off its National Programme for IT (NPfIT) contract.

In the words of its Chief Clinical Information Officer, Dr. Tony Newman-Sanders, “In the past several years we have been working with other organisations across our health community in South West London, on how to use the opportunity of reprocuring our picture archiving and communication system [PACS] and associated image data store to do it all better second time around,” explains Dr. Newman-Sanders.

The new system will not just underpin its new PACS solution it will also enable the Trust to share all kinds of content more effectively across different departments of the Trust which includes acute and community services. The Trust also hopes that, working with other SynApps solutions across South West London, it will be able to safely share patient images with other healthcare providers in a way that NPfIT was unable to achieve.

To get there, Croydon has renewed a core PACS contract with PACS leader Sectra, but has added on the SynApps-sourced VNA content management system, based on the Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS) Documentum from EMC, that will allow clinicians much easier access to radiology data.

The solution includes all existing diagnostic radiology images but will soon include a host of non-radiology files, from cardiology, obstetric ultrasound, plus videos of arthroscopies from theatre, endoscopy and medical photography.

Beyond that, Croydon is planning for the VNA to encompass a vast range of non-imaging data – such as structured and unstructured medical documents and eventually linking up with the organisation’s SharePoint collaboration engine to manage corporate documents and management processes on a single platform.

Croydon reviewed the services of several VNA manufacturers before selecting SynApps and Sectra, with the former’s expertise in open data standards such as XDS being a key factor, says Dr Newman-Sanders. “Having data secured in a non-proprietary format was at the top of our priorities,” he confirms, while the potential of VNA as a driver towards becoming ‘paperless,’ was another plus point.

Commenting on securing Croydon as another major UK Trust moving to a VNA-based content approach beyond PACS, SynApps Solutions’ Managing Director, Jim Whitelaw, noted, “We are delighted to be working with another major NHS body to help it realise its paperless ambitions.”

The PACS side of the deal was signed in January, with the VNA set for go live with both archived and new X-ray imagery in June 2015.

About SynApps

SynApps is an independent services and solutions company specialising in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. Founded in 2003 by former Documentum services professionals, the company provides consultancy, implementation and support services for EMC Documentum, and has authored a suite of content integration solutions, ConXApps, that allow businesses to quickly maximise their investment in ECM technologies. Organisations across healthcare, government and commercial markets rely on SynApps solutions and services to capture and share knowledge more dynamically and efficiently.

Find out more at synapps-solutions.com, or follow the firm on Twitter @SynAppsSol