London launches city-wide summary care records

The BMJ reports that London has launched this week a city-wide EPR system with summary data uploaded from primary care.

Summary care records consist of summaries of core information such as drug treatments, allergies, adverse reactions, and important health information—and possibly the patient’s wishes for care at the end of life. These will be accessible at any location the patient is treated. Information for each record comes from the patient’s existing general practice records and is added to as necessary by other healthcare staff treating the patient.

DoH publishes criteria for EPR systems

The Department of Health has published a set of criteria for successful introduction of Electronic Patient Record systems by vendors in the acute sector. Despite the fact that a good amount of progress has been made on the NHS IT front (such as Choose and Book), they have urged that a higher pace is needed for the hospital patient information systems to be successfully implemented and deployed.

Open Access week

Next week is Open Access week.

Research institutes, colleges, universities, and advocacy organizations everywhere will host events or wear buttons to express their support for free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research.

Yale / UCL partnership

The Yale Daily News reports of a Yale / University College London partnership in cardiovascular research. This is even more interesting now that the THE - QS World University Rankings have been published, finding Yale and UCL at places 3 and 4 respectively.

Online medical records

The NY Times reports on startups tackling the problem of giving patients instant and unlimited access to their health records online, something that the public health care systems in both the US and the UK have failed to provide so far.

The road to patient electronic health records

Companies are pushing towards making patient electronic health records available for small practices, as reported by the NY Times.

Why is scientific data sharing not happening

Interesting article from Nature on why sharing of scientific data is not happening as rapidly as expected.