NPfIT – UNFIT?

Well it had to happen eventually…
The National Audit Office has produced its third report on the National Program for IT (NPfIT) and panned it.

I’d figured that something like this was in the offing following reports last week that CSC were not going to have their contract reviewed until after the NAO published the report. After all, the NAO has been saying things like this for some time. I don’t suppose I should be too surprised having read Prof Greenhalgh’s 234 page review from May last year which also suggested that SCRs and HealthSpace weren’t going to be the ringing success that was promised…

And the media outlets have taken little time in jumping on this.

BBC - the schedule is slipping, GP practices are pulling out yet the costs remain broadly the same -

Remind me how does that work again? Who on earth negotiated the contracts that allowed such profligate spending to go unchecked with no comeback on the providers for such significant failures or was the scope of the work so far removed from the reality that those that bid for the contracts underpriced their work…

BMJ – most of the article is hidden behind a paywall – surely an opportunity to stick in the knife would be better seen by all?

Daily Mail - the claws are out again ‘has cost billions without delivering ANY benefits’
Richard Bacon Conservative MP who has followed the program since it was launched said: ‘It is perfectly clear that throwing more money at the problem will not work. ’This turkey will never fly and it is time the Department of Health faced reality and channelled the remaining funds into something useful that will actually benefit patients. The largest civilian I.T. project in the world has failed.’

No benefits at all? – Really Mr Bacon, I suppose NHS net and the N3 network pale into insignificance but the infrastructure investments had to be made… the issue is what to do about the EHR mess we are faced with.

Well perhaps going forward we should be looking at open source solutions that can be tailored by individual hospitals but retain a universal user interface/look and feel like CURIO – That would be ONE HUGE improvement given that junior medical staff change posts every 6 months and have to get used to yet another system from the cowboy that offloaded the last shiny bauble onto the IT commissioners who never ask the opinion of the medical professionals who have to use the systems…

Reuters singles out BT and CSC for particular ire and poor outcomes…

And the medical bloggers:

eHealth Insider does a nice summary timeline of the troubled program too – but the issues with Lorenzo seem to have been a major issue for the delivery – no doubt iSoft financial troubles and being bought out by CSC can’t have made it any easier…

Northern Doc is his usual intemperate and coruscating self goes on to comment that these failures of delivery are not news to frontline staff and that the rollout really didn’t/doesn’t engage with the people best able to spot the pitfalls: “This is apparently the third report by the National Audit Office and what it says is a reflection of what we troops on the ground see and deal with daily. We however knew that. Thank you Auntie for just realizing that.”

OnMedica focuses on the failure to deliver the Summary Care Records:

“The goal that all patients should have an electronic care record will not be achieved, the National Audit Office reported today. It said the rate at which electronic records are being generated “is falling far below expectations”.”

Pulse remains measured:

“The report from the National Audit Office report – published today – is highly critical of the the National Programme for IT (NPfIT) begun by the previous Government and finds that it is running five years late, at a cost of £11.4bn and with no end in sight.”

<rant>

So exactly why do we continue to remove the development from the end users – are we destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again? I for one hope that the NAO report forces the companies that have been contracted to provide equipment and software to wake up. Perhaps they will for once realise that by failing to engage with the end-users, the systems that they develop will not meet the needs of the end-users and therefore the systems’ usefulness will suffer.

</rant>

Xobni, Activeinbox and other email management

Xobni, yes, it’s Inbox backwards and that pretty much sums up the approach to sorting out the morass of email that we all have to deal with these days. So far, I have it installed on my WORK machine only.

As might be apparent from previous posts, I’m all about making it easier to find stuff in a hurry.

1. Windows 7 desktop search is pretty good,
2. Outlook is OK at finding things if you give it permissions to crawl through everything but…
3. Xobni actually makes a huge difference to finding those rogue emails (assuming you haven’t deleted them) :)

I’ve been using the Xobni Outlook client for a while now and recently added (today) the BlackBerry mobile app for managing and finding stuff whilst out and about.

I hadn’t appreciated quite how dependent on my Outlook archive I had become until I lost a huge amount of data recently, the only backup of which was eaten by a rogue security installation which has ensured that I now have EVERYTHING of value synced to the cloud through Evernote.

Incidentally, Xobni does a nice plugin which fires stuff to Evernote and tags your contacts which is kind of useful if you move about a bit…

I’ve also been mucking about with the BETA for Xobni in Gmail and have signed up to the alpha program in iOS when they get around to publishing it…

I’ll let you know how I get on but as of today, I no longer have >1500 emails in my Gmail inbox thanks to yet another freemium product: Activeinbox which provides a GTD plugin for Gmail. Thus far I haven’t had too much to do with it to know if it’s worth upgrading (personally) but it’s nice to be able to have a ZERO inbox in more than one location. Now to sort out my personal inbox at home and maybe harmonise everything so that I can manage personal stuff on the iPhone – more on this in a future blog post…

For the moment, however, I’ll sign off with every intention of getting some kip…

Inkscape. Draw Freely.

Inkscape. Draw Freely found this whilst looking for a free, open-source editor of Adobe Illustrator and SVG formats – this is AMAZING.

Ended up making some buttons for the SharePoint views at work – will wait for feedback from my team before going nuts – the nice thing is being able to work in vector then output PNGs.

Ace product and FREE!

Scrible… terrible spelling, but interesting product

Being an advocate for doing more in the cloud, I’ve been looking for a better way for the team to collaborate on various research projects and have just found Scrible thanks to another post from Mashable.

Although their proofreader needs some education, this startup has some pretty impressive funding with half a million USD from the National Science Foundation… it seems to complement other research tools such as Zotero and Evernote.

I use and pay for both but this collaborative research tool seems pretty good at providing a common workplace and ability to have more than one researcher comment on a particular item of interest, noting their thoughts on why it can be considered important (or not)…

From their page, this is how it works:

Add scrible’s Toolbar to your browser	Use the Toolbar to annotate web pages and…
…share your web research with others! …save it online to your Personal Library in the cloud.	Peruse, organize, search and retrieve your research in your Personal Library at www.scrible.com

Using a browser plugin – I’ve got it working in IE and Chrome so far, but haven’t installed in Firefox yet.

Perhaps some of my colleagues will take the plunge and give it a try…

Workflow (Part 2)

In the first part of this topic, I covered my scraping of information from RSS using Google reader and then holding “buckets” for later review such as readitlater or send it to Evernote.

Click on the above image to go to LucidChart to see the flowchart representing this aspect of the work or download the PDF…

The reason for going down this route is based on my attempts to implement the disciplines in Getting Things Done (GTD) written by David Allen.

In short, everything that has your attention needs to be gathered in one place and sorted into actionable items.

I would say I am an enthusiast rather than adept at following the GTD methodology but it has helped keep me on a relatively even keel, even if it has driven my wife up the wall from time to time when I decide to “get clear”. What I am still working on is the keeping it clear…

So, how does GTD impact me on a daily basis when doing work related tasks? Well, I’ve been using a combination of things so far but have found that the combination of MS Outlook and my BlackBerry mean that I can handle most email related issues from anywhere. It’s taken a while to set up Outlook to handle the GTD type stuff but there are a couple of great guides which I have found invaluable. I did sign up for a trial run of the GTD Connect but to be honest was so busy in the two weeks of the trial that I didn’t have time to log in to check it out fully… perhaps there is a lesson in there for me.

Anyway, GTD underpins my approach to email handling and is starting to have an impact on the amount of “stuff” I manage to actually get done. FYI, my email inbox is at Zero at least once a week or more often if I can manage it.

As an added bonus, this was me March 12th with the height of the Japan earthquake and tsunami in the news before Fukushima Daiichi took over the following week. Are four screens enough?

Workflow (part 1)

Part of my job requires me to read and digest large quantities of information and then decide what meaning this (usually) web-based information has for me and my team.

My typical day will see me scan the RSS feeds of more than 150 feeds (gosh, I just realised quite how many feeds I get through…) using a Google reader subscription which enables me to consume and mark up as read, the feeds on a multitude of devices. I’m commuting for nearly three hours every day so this time can be put to good use on the way to the office reading work related materials and on the way home with more entertainment content. I’ve found that the iPad and iPhone apps are really great for reading feeds but more on this in a sidebar on the iOS apps I find most useful later.

I’ve found that I can scan through most quickly using a web-browser such as Chrome, although I use IE and Firefox interchangeably.

Setting Google reader to expanded view allows scrolling to automatically mark the posts as read, I tend to open any possibly useful or important posts in a new tab just as a placeholder when scanning through large amounts of items in the feeds. I’ll then use other cloud-based software to either readitlater or send it to Evernote

Recent events have required me to read a number of non-English language sites and the translation features from Google in Chrome or using the Google Toolbar in IE make the automated translation of sites effortless. Yes, it’s machine translation and the resulting text has to be taken with some degree of caution but to get a sense of what is being said, I’ve found it to be invaluable. Another benefit of using Google Reader to aggregate feeds is that I have a searchable trail of all content I’ve browsed since I signed up using Reader. This has saved me on more than one occasion.

More on this later once I’ve got some sleep.

Off to a less than flying start

Well, I’ve finally made good on my decision from my Health Informatics coursework and Professional Development Plan to start blogging as a way to demonstrate how my coursework activities are impacting my line of business work.

I’m also going to take the opportunity to highlight a few blogs I’ve found inspirational over the months and years and use this as an aggregator of good content for those polymaths out there who like being geeky, medical and want to find some new ways of doing things or simply some different ways of being distracted.

The style will be rambling, much like its author. I speak and write British English but am gaining fluency in the versions spoken by our former colonies across the waters… If any strange idioms are unfamiliar, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to unpick them for you all.

Here’s to the next few posts being a little longer and more substantive in content and interest, even if they are reblogging to get the ball rolling.

DrBaz.