Almost half way through another year but there has been no rest for Carelink, the health division of ioko. If anything, things are busier now than ever. After a very prosperous 2005, it looks like 2006 is panning out to be even better. Carelink has had a very busy year already with numerous new wins and exhibiting at Healthcare’s biggest national event, the Healthcare Computing Exhibition and Conference in Harrogate in February. Anyway, more on that later, here’s what Carelink has been busy with since we last met.
Simon Hudson
A) Recent Wins
These have included the rapid deployment of an NHS Core Site implementation for East Lancashire Healthcare NHS Trust’s internet site. NHS Core site is our solution built around a leading content management application, providing a website that looks good, meets NHS guidelines and is quick and easy to maintain by non-technical people; whilst providing many advanced features to both authors and visitors to it.
Darren Kenley, Communications Team - East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust
NHS Core Site has also been taken up recently by both Avon & Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust and Hull & East Riding Health informatics Service.
For more information on NHS Core Site, please click here
On top of this, there has also recently been more SharePoint implementations for Brent PCT and the London Deanery.
For more information on SharePoint, please click here
B) Airedale Prize
We are pleased to see Airedale NHS Trust achieve a runner up position in the ‘Non-clinical Improvement’ category from the West Yorkshire Modernisation Awards 2006. Airedale entered the category with their NHS Document Management System. Having purchased SharePoint, Airedale NHS Trust sought a partner that could design and deploy the Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS) in a manner that met their precise requirements and chose Carelink for this project. It was the following factors that lead to Airedale being shortlisted:
- Utilising the NHS enterprise agreement with Microsoft to provide a trust-wide document management system, thus providing employees with accurate, reliable and up-to-date information and knowledge.
- Reducing the risk of confusion arising from staff accessing out-of-date hard copy documents.
- Allowing staff to immediately access structured information online. Staff now actively find up-to-date materials, disseminate them and make any changes at once.
For more information on the installation of SharePoint by Carelink for Airedale, please click here to view the full case study
C) CMS Seminars
After receiving feedback from our successful ‘Sharepoint for the NHS’ and ‘Extending SharePoint for the NHS’ seminars last year, we are now holding two Content Management Systems (CMS) seminars. The first of these is in York on the 13th June and the second is a week later in London on the 20th June. As usual there will be the blend of technical and non-technical information as well as the interactive atmosphere that has been proven to work best in these situations. The aim of these seminars is to provide insight and information and to allow networking opportunities.
For more details on the agenda for the York seminar on the 13th June, please click here
For more details on the agenda for the London seminar on the 20th June, please click here
For more details on registrations, please click here
D) Carelink Website Redevelopment
We practice what we preach and have recently redeveloped our own website technology used for our NHS Core Site solution. Since going live with the MS CMS version in 2004 the Carelink team and business has grown substantially and we wanted a site that could cope with these new demands. The new site has already proved to be invaluable. Because it is easier to add and maintain content there has been an increase in the amount of topical material added to the site by the Carelink team. The ease of creating users and groups, with differing permission across the site, has also meant that some Carelink partners have been given rights to maintain their own company and technology pages on the site (Interse, for instance, now maintain their partner page and details of their impressive iBox search and metadata technology). Other benefits have included the site now being extensively used during client demonstrations of NHS Core Site and a client log in facility where clients can subscribe to the site to get specific information that is important to them.
Please click here for the full case study
For information on how to register on the site, please click here
E) Office 2007
We have been working closely with Microsoft on the next new version of the Microsoft Office package. ioko are the number one Gold certified partner in the United Kingdom with 9 competencies and have hence been chosen as one of the handful of companies to help test the new Beta version of Office 2007. A number of our staff have now been using it internally over the last couple of months and will now be testing the Beta 2 version shortly, as Microsoft have been doing. The official version of Office 2007 is released later this year.
For more details on Office 2007, please click here
F) Migration to N3 Connection
In order to provide our customers with the best service possible, we have recently made a significant investment in migrating from our NHSnet connection to a new N3 connection. The new connection has increased bandwidth, to give faster response times and has a secondary link to provide improved resiliency. In the coming weeks we will be adding an additional firewall into our N3 infrastructure, so that there is no single point of failure on either our Internet or N3 hosting networks.
During the migration to N3 there was some disruption to the service, due to unforeseen problems with BT transferring IP addresses. Unfortunately this was outside of our control and we apologise for any loss of connectivity suffered during this time.
While we always try to keep our charges at the minimum level needed to enable us to continue to provide the service, providing hosting on the N3 network requires considerable and continued expenditure on both the security infrastructure and connectivity bandwidth. Consequently, we recognise that our charges might not compare favourably with those of companies who provide Internet only hosting and even though we are not in direct competition with Internet only service providers, we want our customers to feel that they get more for their money than just the added ability to serve content to N3. This is why we pride ourselves on striving to deliver an excellent service, in terms of the underlying technology platform and the accessibility, competence and responsiveness of our people in the service team.
G) NHS Mergers
The Department of Health (DoH) has recently announced that many of the SHAs, Ambulance Trusts and PCTs will be merging and that this has to be completed by October 2006. Patricia Hewitt, DoH Health Secretary, came to the decision to accelerate plans for a wave of mergers among England's 303 primary care trusts (since these bodies were collectively responsible for spending about £54 billion/year on commissioning care for NHS patients) and reform them into 150 PCTS and align NHS areas more closely to local government boundaries. The government hopes the mergers will contribute to a saving of £250m in costs.
As Carelink works with over 200 NHS organisations this will affect billing requirements since we will now have various bill payers in the same organisation (and we don’t want to be taking extra money that is not ours!) If you could please forward this to those individuals accountable and ask them to contact simon.hudson@ioko.com, this would be most appreciated.
Please see the Department of Health website for more information on this
H) Healthcare Computing 2006
Carelink once again exhibited at the annual Healthcare Computing conference at the Harrogate International Conference Centre. This event has proved to be the best of its type and we again enjoyed a successful show as well as the bonus of meeting many of our current customers. This year we decided to share our stand with 2 of our partners - Intercall (the largest dedicated conferencing service provider in the world) and EPiServer (a content management system for simple and swift handling of information on intranets, extranets or public Web sites without the person needing any previous knowledge of creating Web pages).
Carelink also sponsored a 30 minute case history presentation session at the event that took place at 13.00 on the 21st March entitled ‘Using Microsoft SharePoint in an NHS Organisation’ given by Richard Collinge, Knowledge Manager for Airedale NHS Trust.
I) SharePoint
Carelink is the leading implementer of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server in the NHS. Some of the organisations already implementing it include Airedale NHS Trust, Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust, Thames Valley SHA, Essex Shared Services Agency, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the Health Protection Agency