Although I can not find the direct link to the report it is interesting to read of another NHS trust pushing the use of technology. According to Publictechnology.net Dumfries and Galloway are recommending that the iPhone is fit for clinical use. This is just another example of the use of UC technology within health care.
While trying to search for the article on the Dumfries and Galloway website I managed to find further references to telehealth services provided by the Trust, take a look here
Clinicians should be educated to build list views of their patients to reduce the need to enter names alongside patient data in such forms and encouraged not to enter patient names in any of the free-text areas of the application used for storing information.
I attended IDC’s excellent UC conference in the UK last week and wanted to share my thoughts on the event:
Last year the arguments provided by the vendors (Microsoft, IBM, Accenture and Cisco) were under developed and immature. I’m not sure they would have done anything to convince skeptics on the benefits of UC.
This year it was different Avaya, IBM and T-Systems all provided very good presentations on the benefits of UC and why organisations need to think through their UC strategy. (Cisco and Accenture did not present this year and I had to leave before the Microsoft presentation).
There was a different attitude from attendees. Last year there was confusion as to why they should even think about UC let alone deploy. This year almost everyone I spoke with said ‘we know we need to do something next year, we are just not sure what and how’
My view on the shift in attitude stems from a number of different areas. Firstly IT shops are waking up to the fact that they have to respond to the trend in the consumerisation of IT. IT feels embattled and under siege by consumer IT and deploying UC is one area that can help IT respond. Secondly telecom estates that are reaching end of life now have serious competition from UC offers such as Microsoft’s Lync. Last year IT had no confidence in OCS as a PBX replacement but I do find a different, more positive attitude to Lync. Finally globalisation and rapid customer communication continue as trends within all large organisations, while the business may not be demanding directly for UC the requirements of flexible, anywhere, anytime internal and external communication can be met by UC solutions.
The biggest open question around UC I found this year at IDC was ‘how do i do it’ and that is one area I will be watching this year. UC demand is in the marketplace but are their organisations and vendors who can deliver?
Maybe not quite Unified Communications but I wanted to highlight the St Helens and Knowsley Teaching NHS Trust that has just announced that they are going paperless in their day to day operations. By doing so they hope to improve customer service and reduce costs.
Take a look at the publictechnology.net article for further details here
“This is a key element in our £338 million rebuild of our two main sites, as we see fully electronic patient records as central to delivering excellent patient care in world-class facilities,” its director of Informatics, Neil Darvill, told PublicTechnology.net.
I have written a couple of times that Kinect’s technology could play a large role in Microsoft’s next wave of Office and Desktop software. I’m not surprised people have managed to build drivers for Kinect and are showing off the potential on both Windows and Mac as I assume the Kinect technology has been built to support desktop software.
Normally Microsoft aren’t too pleased with home brew coding but I am willing to bet on this occasion they are pleased to see the quick and enthusiastic development. Not only does it provide a validation of their investment in Kinect technology outside of Xbox it also provides them with more potential use cases and skilled coders.
Watch out for plenty more Kinect related news within the Enterprise.
I love finding examples of Unified Communications working within a business application and for a manufacturer of products there can be nothing more important than integrating their machines into the company communication system. Wonderware have a case study on the Microsoft site on how they have coded OCS presence and instant messaging into their monitoring software.
Take a look at the case study here and take a look at Rainer’s blog here
“If you look at the technology advancements of the past 20 years, our industry has done a great job creating solutions that make it possible for machines to talk to each other—but has not done much to help people talk to each other quickly and efficiently when there is a question or a problem related to a process,” Regan says. “We have technology that can identify literally in microseconds whether a machine needs maintenance, but it might take hours for someone to decide whether to address the problem immediately or to wait a week. Those kinds of decisions have to be made by people, and industrial software doesn’t easily support decision-making processes.”Wonderware, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, tackled the issue by taking core technologies from Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and incorporating them into its manufacturing solutions. These technologies include instant messaging (IM), Web conferencing, and presence, which shows whether someone in a network is online and available to communicate.
More evidence of iPad usage within the health care sector in that Medtronic are buying 4500 units reports cio.co.uk. It would be really interesting to find out what other uses Medtronic will find for them.
“It was such a huge success, because people came to our booth not to look at the Medtronic product but to look at the iPad,” he said. “I didn’t care – I just wanted them at the booth.”
But Hedges bought many more iPads because they offer instant access to data and video, a particularly important attribute when showing product information to customers . Hedges added that the iPad’s instant-on capability was a key feature for the business.
I’ve no doubt we will start seeing demand for 3D video conferencing within the enterprise over the next 5 years. CNN used a very early and expensive system for their election coverage in 2008. The technology is coming…watch out IT managers for that request coming to you via the boardroom in the next 5 years. I know for a fact at least one CIO was inspired by the CNN coverage to investigate the technology but found it prohibitively expensive and complex to consider deploying. But with clever guys like the University of Arizona developing the technology and Cisco ready to pump into the enterprise watch out.
No doubt the general thrust of Millennial’s entering the workplace places a pressure on Enterprise IT is valid but I do feel that the argument is overblown by the industry and suffocates the space for other justifications to deploy UC.
Who says millennials are going to create anarchy in your office? Shelley Portet – herself one of these terrifying creatures – sets the record straight about young people, technology and the workplace.
A bit like He Who Must Not Be Named – that’s a Harry Potter reference by the way for you oldies – young workers born after 1985 are apparently now so terrifying to employers they are given the ominous title The Millennials.
Fears of what will happen when these young people enter the workforce – so tech-savvy that they will bring anarchy where there was corporate order – have spread through the business world. How will they be managed? How will they be recruited? How will they be controlled? Who will save us from them?
