National Health Service (NHS)

See the following -

NHS England Says No To VistA

Rebecca Todd | eHealth Insider | September 30, 2013

NHS England has decided not to pay £7m to anglicise the US Veterans Health Administration’s open source electronic medical record, VistA. Instead, it will create a framework for NHS trusts to buy open source system support, hosting and change management. Read More »

NHS England Wants Open Source Option

Lis Evenstad | eHealth Insider | June 28, 2013

NHS England wants an open source electronic patient record system to be an option for NHS trusts, “if they want it." Read More »

NHS Grows A NoSQL Backbone And Rips Out Its Oracle Spine [United Kingdom]

Gavin Clarke | The Register | September 9, 2014

Open source? In the government? Ha ha! What, wait ...?....

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NHS Hack Weekend - Geeks Who Love The NHS

Staff Writer | Liverpool John Moores University | September 28, 2012

NHS Hack weekends are driven by Ross Jones and Dr Carl Jones, collectively known as Open Health Care, both committed to producing high quality software that improves health outcomes. Borne out of a similar extremely successful  event in London, these hack days bring together software developers and coders with doctors, health care leaders and practitioners to create disruptive solutions to problems in healthcare services. Read More »

NHS Open-Source Spine 2 Platform To Go Live Next Week

Caroline Baldwin | ComputerWeekly.com | August 20, 2014

A new iteration of the NHS platform that connects clinicians, patients and national applications is due to be completed this coming weekend.  Considered by the government to be critical national infrastructure, the Spine platform is a communications hub that connects key IT services developed as part of the troubled NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT)...

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NHS Shifts From Ill-Fated Spine To Spine 2 [United Kingdom]

Sooraj Shah | Computing | August 27, 2014

The NHS Spine has been moved onto a new infrastructure by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) in an IT operation completed over the weekend.  The Spine is a part of the national infrastructure that stores patient information and enables electronic messaging, it was part of the ill-fated NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT)...

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NHS Should 'Look To Lastminute.com'

Lis Evenstad | eHealth Insider | April 15, 2013

Trade body Intellect has urged the NHS to learn from the private sector when it comes to building a new digital architecture to meet the ‘paperless’ challenge. Read More »

NHS Spine ‘Successfully’ Rebuilt, Says HSCIC

Sooraj Shah | Computing | September 9, 2014

The NHS Spine 2 has been "successfully" rebuilt and launched, according to the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC).  The Spine is a part of the national infrastructure that stores patient information and enables electronic messaging; it was one of the only parts of the ill-fated NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) that emerged with some credibility...

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NHS Staff Should Code - Kelsey

Jon Hoeksma | eHealth Insider | October 4, 2012

Tim Kelsey, the NHS Commissioning Board’s first national director of patients and information, is to encourage doctors and nurses and other front-line staff to learn how to program. Read More »

NHS Tears Out Its Oracle Spine In Favour Of Open Source

Jack Clark | The Register | October 10, 2013

Health authority parachutes in Riak, Redis to save on dosh & screwups. The UK government's quest to get public services to use more open source technologies seems to be taking hold, judging by the revamp of the NHS's very large Spine service. Read More »

NHS Technology – Being Open To Open Source

Staff Writer | PublicService.co.uk | August 7, 2013

For three years Wayne Parslow, vice president of Harris Healthcare EMEA, has called for the NHS to embrace open source technology. Now NHS England is promoting the benefits of moving in this direction but Parslow warns that we must walk before we try to run Read More »

NHS Urged to Consider Microsoft Alternatives Following Cyber Attacks

Jon Hoeksma | Digital Health | May 17, 2017

In the wake of Friday’s international cyber attacks, which caused widespread disruption across NHS organisations, a small team of developers is recommending the health service reduce its reliance on Microsoft. The NHS almost exclusively uses Microsoft operating systems, some of which – like Windows XP – are no longer officially supported. To demonstrate that there is a licence-free alternative, GP Marcus Baw and technologist Rob Dyke have adapted the open source Linux-based Ubuntu operating system specifically for the NHS...

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NHS VistA – An Update

Staff Writer | Woodcote Consulting | June 17, 2013

There is growing support for the production of a NHS version of the VistA the US open source EPR used by the US Veterans Administration and more recently by a number of health systems outside of the US. Read More »

NHS VistA: The Enlightened Choice?

Carl Reynolds | Nuffield Trust | July 12, 2012

The potential value to the NHS of learning from the international experience of the electronic medical record (EMR) system, VistA, was identified in the January 2002 NHS Information Authority White Paper:Open Source Software and the NHS. Read More »

Online-only Pharmacies That Don't Require Prescriptions Could Fuel Antibiotic Resistance

Press Release | Imperial College London | February 16, 2017

The researchers from Imperial College London analysed 20 pharmacies that were available for UK citizens to access online. This is one of the few studies to have examined the online availability of antibiotics and to have explored the potential effects on public health. The research is published in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. Antibiotics are classed as prescription only medicines in the UK, meaning they cannot legally be sold to consumers without a valid prescription...

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