A new partnership between Bull HN Information Systems Ltd and the London consultancy arm of international accountants Deloitte Haskins & Sells, has been formed with the aim of taking the UK’s National Health Service out of what Mark Leaning of the Clinical Operational Research Unit at University College London has dubbed the dark age in information technology. The partnership is offering two new software packages claimed to address all the information requirements of the UK’s health authorities, in the light of the government’s recent White Paper on the future of the health service – Working for Patients. On the basis of the paper and other research, Bull reckons that the healthcare sector will be the largest single buyer of information technology in the UK over the next few years. On offer is the RME Resource Management Environment and HIS Healthcare Information System, based on products from New Brunswick, Canada-based software house Eversoft Ltd. They are already used extensively across Canada, and run under both Unix and Pick. The business end of the two packages combine an Oracle database with CAMMS software engineering management software and an applications generation language. The Resource Management Environment package is intended to integrate of all of a hospital’s disparate management, administration and resource allocation processes, its clinical and medical systems and related community based services – such as general practices within one information system, designed to support the day-to-day operational needs of the organisation. The Healthcare Information System software is designed primarily to address the special requirements of the clinical and medical sectors Leaning says that the Health Services desparately needs systems that handle clinical data – at the point where data is collected – and integrated with other hospital systems. At present Regional Health Authorities have a whole range of systems installed, but the government’s White Paper emphasises that new Health Service computer purchases should be based upon non-proprietary equipment, using standards such as Unix and Open Systems Interconnection protocols. As well as enabling authorities to exchange data and improve resource and management control on a national scale, systems should also allow the dissemination of expert information from research centres to sites all around the country – such as the recently publicised national schemes for the testing and monitoring of breast and cervical cancer in women. It is also hoped that the development of health service computing will bring closer co-operation with the European Economic Community’s Advanced Informatics in Medicine project, known as AIM. Bull says that it is to offer the software to run on the new computers that health authorities will be buying on the strength of the White Paper recommendations – and all the better if it is Bull equipment.
