Evolution of Administrative Applications within Health.

Health in the UK has undergone several evolutionary changes in the past 20 years.

Early on, the PC was quickly adopted and the chaotic development of islands of information with no sharing of information, security or in many cases, even backup processes was subsequently replaced with large HISS systems in the early 90's.

These huge corporate systems saw the beginning of large IT procurements within Health. Although not entirely painless, these procurements helped rationalise IT within Trusts and may well have slowed the growth of the stand-alone, PC based databases constructed by IT savvy clinicians, but it certainly hasn't stopped them.

We are now undergoing the largest shake-up in IT within health. Connecting for Health is responsible for the National Program for I.T. (NPfIT) is also proving very challenging but it is shaking up the sector; laying the foundations of the next generation of computer systems and introducing standards which should ultimately help in the sharing of information between care groups and Health Authorities/Trusts.

Given the size the of this current evolutionary jump, we believe that there must be stages within the process that allow or indeed call for, smaller step changes in the technology. Data set change notifications and advances in medicine call for changes in the way data is recorded and reported. At the same time as this business model evolves there are also new and exciting emerging technology which should not be overlooked.

The business and banking sectors have been very quick to adopt certain technologies that enable secure, reliable data communication over a wide area network. These technologies are ideally suited to Health.
We believe it is possible to provide working solutions and interfaces using many of these technologies such as web services, enabling Trusts to adapt to the changing needs of the user in the short term without compromising their involvement in the national programme.