National IT projects singled out for praise

THREE medical technology projects are in the running to scoop awards at this year's E-Health Insider Awards. NHS Choices, NHS Pathways and DH QIPP are all finalists and will find out if they have won at a ceremony in October. The Couch to 5K initiative, developed and delivered by NHS Choices, has made it to the final stages of the Best Use of Social Media in Healthcare category, while NHS Pathways' Capacity Management System project is a finalist in the Most Promising IT for GP-led Commissioning category. Completing the hat-trick is the DH QIPP Urgent Care Clinical Dashboard, supported by NHS Bolton and the DH Informatics Directorate, which has been shortlisted for the Outstanding Work in IT-enabled Change in Healthcare gong. Deborah El-Sayed, programme director for NHS Choices, said: "Couch to 5K continues to grow and provide the public with a central website where they can find health-related information and supporting tools to motivate them to get fit. It has been downloaded more than a million times and we hope it will grow further." Jackie Shears, programme head at NHS Pathways, added: "The programme combines two NHS-created systems to offer great potential to provide data to commissioners on the full extent of demand for individual clinical skills, by time of day and post code. The programme is in high demand and we hope it will bring the NHS and patients real benefits to patient care." And David Corbett, informatics lead, said of the QIPP project: "The dashboard is helping GPs and other clinicians to identify patients who are presenting at unscheduled care settings and to use this real-time information to improve and more pro-actively manage and co-ordinate the delivery of care, particularly for vulnerable patients and those with multiple long-term conditions."