BT eHealth Insider Awards
Renal PatientView was nominated for an award in the category of "Best Use of ICT in Patient and Citizen Involvement" at a ceremony held at the Millennium Mayfair Hotel, London, on the 17th November 2008. Congratulations on being the runner up in a very prestigious and closely fought contest. Whatever the outcome, a great time
eHealth Insider Awards was had by all.

Vitalpulse Opens New Offices
Vitalpulse now occupies a new suite of offices in Great Dunmow, Essex.
Suite 9
The Chestnuts
4 Stortford Road
Great Dunmow
Essex
CM6 1DA
This location now houses the VitalData production team and provides a central location for support, training courses and client meetings. Photo
New Offices

BRS/RA 2008 in Glasgow
The exhibition was a great success. We were inundated with visitors wanting demonstrations of VitalData, in particular its latest configuration utility, and to sample our peppermint creams and Rocky Road cookies. We apologise to those who either had to wait a while or found our stand a little too busy. Here's a photo
BRS 2008 of a visitor with a bulging backpack just minutes after our 24 inch monitor went missing. Anyone recognising this individual is asked to contact us immediately. He needs to be told that not everything on our exhibition stand was a freebee.

Swansea next in line for VitalData
Morriston Hospital has placed an order for VitalData to replace its aging Novell based Proton system. A baseline implementation of VitalData has just been installed including all their current demographic data, clinical details and pathology data. Over the next few weeks we'll be migrating their remaining screens and upgrading the pathology link. The new system is expected to go live in the Spring of 2008.

Welcome Tom Melly
Tom (originally support engineer for CCL) has now joined us at Vitalpulse. We've known Tom for years and we are very pleased to welcome him to the team. Naturally Tom is an expert on all Proton issues but he is also an accomplished software designer in his own right. Tom's responsibilities will include development of laboratory, PAS and dialysis machine interfaces, plus of course an element of support.

Derby City gets VitalData
On 22nd February VitalData went live at the Derby City Hospital Renal Unit, right on schedule. The database was fully loaded with all historical patient data from their old Proton system, and all external interfaces were operational from day 1, including laboratory feeds, Renal Registry reports, Renal Patient View, and even a new PAS interface for automatically registering new patients and maintaining existing demographic data.

Dr Maarten Taal, Consultant Nephrologist at Derby City says: “You and your team have done a superb job throughout this process and we are very pleased with the system that has been delivered. We are confident that it will bring significant improvements to our ability to monitor and deliver patient care.”

Vitalpulse founder, Andy Webb says: “We are absolutely delighted that Derby has decided to invest in VitalData. Their data is now secured for the future in an industry-standard environment and is more accessible than ever due to the proliferation of reporting tools available.”

He continues: “Derby already uses Crystal Reports throughout the Trust and they intend to use it for all future data reporting from VitalData.”

For those interested in upgrading, Vitalpulse offers the option to convert to nationally accepted standards, including the UK Renal Registry timeline.

RPV Award for Excellence
Congratulations to the Renal Patient View team. Earlier this year the project was awarded the “NHS Leadership in Health Informatics Accolade”.

We are proud to be associated with the project. Responsible for designing the XML schema, file construction and encryption mechanism, and the continuing deployment of data collection and transmission procedures at every Proton site. We are currently completing the 20th installation and hope to have all sites up and running over the next few months. In parallel with this we are implementing an upgrade to RPV phase 3, which includes new data items, re-send options with user defined date ranges, and improved security measures.

Although Proton is an aging product, we have successfully maintained its productive life through enhancements which exploit current IT capabilities, including performance indicators, XML messaging, real-time interfaces and data review via browser technology.

The latest units to be enroled into the project in 2007 include The Royal Berkshire Hopistal, The Cumberland Infirmary and Gloucester Royal Hospital.

Celebrating our 10th year and expanding
Latest to join our team at Vitalpulse is our old friend Richard Read . Many of you will know Rich from his work with CCL and in particular on Clinical Vision. Amongst other existing projects, Rich takes responsibility for mySQL installations, transmission security and firewalls. Meanwhile Giles has been busy completing our latest and finest brand leading product, VitalData. 2008 promises to be our busiest year yet!

National Renal Dataset
In 2004 Vitalpulse was commissioned by the NHSiA to assist in the compilation of the National Renal Dataset for NPfIT, now Connecting for Health. We completed this in consultation with UK Registries and UK Transplant. A discussion document has now been published and distributed by the Dept of Health and the Renal Association. We will be maintaining an active and watching brief on this project, and consideration of the proposed data items will form part of our database planning strategies.

From Here to Maternity
Derby City Maternity Unit has ordered “Project A”, a PC application that replicates Proton screens in a stand-alone Microsft Access environment running on laptop PCs. This allows midwives to review data whilst visiting patients in their own homes, updating it as necessary. Once re-connected to the master Proton database “Project A” exports all new data and uploads it to Proton.

A 15-user trial system is underway for roll out to an intended 80 midwives this Autumn.

Vitalpulse Excels again
The latest company to exploit the analytical capabilities of our Excel Interface is Wyeth who will be using it to monitor and compare the long term efficacy of immuno-suppressive regimes. Trials have been conducted at The University Hospital of Wales and a roll out to other units is expected early next year.

The Word is Out
Cross House Hospital and St James’s University Hospital are the latest sites to install our Proton Word Interface, bringing the total to an amazing 150 copies rolled out to date.

The interface generates letters through Microsoft Word, automatically incorporating patient data extracted from Proton. Any additional information added to the letters by a secretary or clinician is extracted by the process and sent back to Proton for inclusion in the patient’s clinical record. Rob Kings says: “We estimate that over the last ten years over 500,000 letters have been created using our software.” A bulk merge option is also available enabling the generation of letters from Proton entirely without human intervention via a virtual instance of Word running on an unattended PC.

Installed with Finesse
Vitalpulse dialysis machine network interfaces continues to prove popular with our clients. Ten Finesse interfaces are already in operation in the UK, with another ten scheduled for installation over the next few weeks. We are also pleased to report a Braun Nexadia interface to Proton being installed at the Royal Berkshire Hospital and a Gambro Exalis version should be available later this year.

Our Carbon Footprint
Part of our new environmental policy (produced in response to recent NHS contractual requirements) restricts site visits to essential on-site development work only. This may cut down on carbon emissions but could mean that we don’t meet our clients face to face nearly as much as we’d like. However, we anticipate that it shouldn’t impact too much on our day-to-day procedures as we have always undertaken most of our work by remote access as far as possible. In fact most contracts are already negotiated, designed, prototyped, deployed and commissioned without setting foot outside the office, reducing project costs by as much as 30% - a saving that is passed on directly to our clients.