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The multi-year project involved the abrupt departure of a CMIO, at least one delay and new IT leadership.

The Center for Rural Health Innovation switched from telehealth carts to portable tech and now treats 26 schools compared with six prior. The implementation offers lessons for rural hospitals and clinics.

NHS Scotland has signed a new agreement with Microsoft to deploy Office 365 and migrate all systems to Windows 10 E5 during the next three years in an effort to boost cyber resilience and mitigate any potential threats. "We're creating the environment and the tools to allow staff and services to flourish. At the moment they are too often hampered by systems that don't join up or make collaboration easy,” said Jeane Freeman, who was appointed as Scotland’s Health Secretary in June this year. Freeman explained this included the development of a new national digital platform and setting out “common standards and approaches for healthcare systems”. HITN sister publication MobiHealthNews reported in August that Dr Alistair Hann, former Skyscanner Chief Technology Officer, had joined the NHS Digital Service, based within the national health board NHS Education for Scotland, to help build the new platform, working with Geoff Huggins, Director of the NES Digital Service, and Liz Elliot, former Chief Operating Officer at the Health Data Research UK institute. Webinar: How Cybersecurity Leaders Avoid Data Breaches in Healthcare Commenting on today’s announcement, Huggins told HITN: "We're building a joined-up health and social care system, based on a National Digital Platform, so that people can get the best care, regardless of where they are. Moving to 365 is a fundamental building-block in that process." Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Social Care agreed a centralised deal with Microsoft, enabling all NHS organisations to use Windows 10 and strengthen their cyber defence capabilities, nearly a year after the WannaCry attack disrupted operations at around one-third of NHS hospital trusts in England and 603 primary care and other NHS organisations. NHS Scotland has the option to extend its three-year agreement with Microsoft for a further 24 months under similar terms. Twitter: @1Leontina Contact the author: lpostelnicu@himss.org

The government should build on existing artificial intelligence R&D plans, instead of starting over from scratch, the health informatics group said.

NHS Digital will cut around 500 jobs in a major restructure expected to "change the skills and capability of its workforce", Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock has said. Hancock confirmed earlier reports that the reconfiguration of NHS Digital would be delivered in a “series of waves”, set to be completed by 2020/21. “At this stage, NHS Digital estimates that a net overall reduction in headcount of circa 500 full time equivalents is expected. A programme of staff engagement and discussions with staff representatives is in place. All staff will be affected by the restructuring and will be required to apply for posts in the new organisation structure,” the secretary told Parliament this week. NHS Digital employs more than 2,500 staff around the country, including in London, Southport, and Southampton, while its head office is based in Leeds. Computer Weekly reported earlier this year that NHS Digital organised several meetings with its staff to inform them of the restructure, with documents sent to employees indicating that those not be appointed by December this year would be offered the option to consider voluntary redundancy, according to an email seen by the publication. Hancock said the agency would “provide every facility to help staff secure suitable alternate employment”. “A professional outplacement service has been secured to work with displaced staff and NHS Digital is seeking opportunities with other public and private sector employers in the areas affected,” he explained. Sean Walsh, NHS Digital Director of Regions and Professions, said: “This restructure is about skilling up our workforce and rethinking our structure. This will ensure that we have the deep skills and technical expertise to deliver the best service for both patients and customers, and that our structure allows us to flex according to the needs of the health and care sector. “We estimate that the restructure will lead to a net reduction of around 500 full time equivalent roles across the organisation. Where possible, this will be through a combination of redeployment, natural turnover and suitable alternative employment. “It is important to note that we cannot be precise about the exact numbers at this stage because they may change to reflect the outcomes of the proposals for change, as well as external influences which may affect us. “This is understandably a difficult and challenging time for our hardworking employees and we are taking every possible step to provide them with all the help and support they need.” Twitter: @1Leontina Contact the author: lpostelnicu@himss.org

AI is already having a big impact, but strategic planning is not keeping pace and healthcare organizations need to be proactive about developing tools now.

Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) has become the first NHS trust and the first Global Digital Exemplar (GDE) to be revalidated against the new Stage 6 HIMSS Analytics international Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) standards that came into force at the beginning of the year. The changes were designed to reflect progress in the healthcare technology and information space during the past few years, with the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) requirement, for instance, moved from higher to lower stages of the model (PACS is now part of the Stage 1 criteria, as opposed to Stage 5). New standards were also introduced to ensure that cybersecurity and disaster recovery were “fully recognised as important factors in a modern health service”, John Rayner, Regional Director for Europe and Latin America, HIMSS Analytics, told Healthcare IT News. “In addition, areas of compliance have been increased to raise the bar and to acknowledge the importance of having these critical services hospital-wide, rather than in a single clinical area. As a result of these changes, some hospitals are likely to find achieving the higher stages of the model more challenging than they did prior to January 2018,” Rayner said. Cambridge University Hospitals went live with Epic back in 2014 CUH, which runs Addenbrooke’s Hospital and The Rosie, originally achieved Stage 6 of the EMRAM standards back in 2015, following the creation of its eHospital digital transformation programme. Webinar: Applying Machine Learning to Patient Records to Improve Clinical Recommendations The HITN team visited CUH more than four years after the “big bang” go-live of their Epic EPR,  configured during an 18-month period to incorporate the trust’s clinical workflows and to support local and national guidelines, and found overwhelming support for its digital agenda. Their EPR is now reportedly being used by around 3,400 staff at peak times across all clinical areas, and Luke Bage, Senior Charge Nurse, told HITN that the system “continually seems to improve”.  “The Epic that you see at the beginning of the year is not the same Epic that you see at the end of the year,” said Dr Afzal Chaudhry, Renal Consultant and Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) at the trust. After developing electronic early warning alerts within the EPR, launched in their Emergency Department in 2016 and across all adult inpatient areas at both hospitals in 2017 to ensure that nurses and doctors are notified if a patient’s clinical observations meet sepsis criteria, the trust has seen a 42 per cent reduction in sepsis mortality. In April this year, CUH linked Epic to the Cerner Millennium system used at West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, helping clinicians securely access clinical information about a patient held within each other’s EPR to improve quality of care, as figures show that nearly 30 per cent of their patients attend both trusts for treatment. The next month, through a digital primary care portal called EpicCare Link, a similar initiative was launched to help GPs and community nurses securely access clinical information about their patients from within the Epic EPR, currently available at Granta Medical Practices in Cambridgeshire. The Care Everywhere HIE functionality also connects CUH to Epic hospitals around the world and, once University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust go live with Epic next spring, the trust will also be connected to them. CUH wants to become the first trust to reach EMRAM Stage 7 in the UK Meanwhile, CUH signed a £107m seven-year contract with Novosco in June to replace and strengthen its infrastructure to take account of “more mobile working, device integration, and accommodate telemedicine, whilst keeping the system secure, protected, and accessible”, according to Chaudhry. The transition process is underway, and the trust now has an ambition to reach Stage 7 of the EMRAM.  “The main things that we would like to focus on are a robust methodology for quality improvement informed by the use of data, so that we’ve got real data-driven analytics to help us understand where we have the greatest opportunities to improve patient care and to measure the beneficial outcomes of that in a sort of continuous improvement cycle,” Chaudhry said. Commenting on today's announcement, Dr Ewen Cameron, CUH Executive Director of Improvement and Transformation, added: “To validate against the new criteria shows how far we have come over the years since we implemented Epic and since our last HIMSS inspection. Our aim now is to further advance our use of technology to provide even greater benefits to our patients and staff and, as a result of doing this, become the first Stage 7 trust in the UK.” Only two other organisations have previously reached Stage 6 of the EMRAM in the UK, Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and St George's University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Twitter: @1Leontina Contact the author: lpostelnicu@himss.org

The new HHS-DHS Health Cybersecurity Coordination Center, HC3, replaces the Healthcare Cybersecurity Communications and Integration Center after a year of turmoil and unraveling.

From basic information governance to advanced precision medicine, health systems large and small describe their strategies for putting data to work.

The mobile patient engagement system also cut no-shows by half and increased the number of referred patients seen by 25 percent.