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A Yorkshire and Humber trust is finding that half of its prescriptions of therapy can be delivered online Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber foundation trust has gone it alone in building an online mental health support and treatment service. The trust, which provides mental health and learning disability services, decided to develop its Talkingsense.org e-clinic facility in-house, following a pilot involving the trust, which abbreviates its name to RDash, North Lincolnshire council's digital inclusion unit and BT. Michelle Larkin, RDash's business development and marketing manager, says...

The Scottish Government's Aliss project is aimed at providing websites with a reliable index of online material on health self-management Long term conditions are a serious problem in Scotland, where about 2 million people, or two-fifths of the population, live with a chronic disease. The government has acknowledged that self-management can play a major role in dealing with conditions including epilepsy, asthma, diabetes, emphysema and chronic bronchitis, but it requires the right tools and information. The internet is often the place where people start, but accurate and localised information...

Patients can benefit from faster access to drugs and greatly reduced travel times when specialists can work remotely The introduction of high speed broadband across the UK in recent years means that 80% of the adult population now has easy access to the internet either at home or at work. But so far, this has made surprisingly little difference to the way in which healthcare services are provided by clinicians and nursing staff. Despite a lot of talk at healthcare conferences, the reality is that you need to look hard to find examples of where telemedicine – as internet-enabled healthcare is known...

The capital is moving discharge notes from fax to secure email, boosting efficiency and helping patients leave hospital promptly Hundreds of patients discharged from London's hospitals each week need continuing care, from health and social care teams. The package of care provided to patients is approved by an advisory panel, who must be satisfied that the appropriate care is in place before the patient can be discharged. The panel's decisions are based on information submitted by both NHS and local authority staff – often more than 80 pages of documents, including paper forms and hand-written...

Foundation trust says that the input and co-operation of hospital staff have been essential to the successful introduction of its Cerner information system "It wasn't a technical project, it was a clinical project," stresses Andy Jardine, director of IT at Newcastle upon Tyne foundation trust. He says that the organisation decided this had to be the trust's approach when implementing Cerner Millennium in 2009, which is now being used by all medical staff. "I think we were very clear from the start that we needed clinical input," he adds. Neil Watson, director of pharmacy...

A Merseyside acute trust has improved its services for patients through digitising paper and manual processes Aintree University hospital trust has reduced C. difficile infections by 69% and improved patient satisfaction by 20% in just 18 months, after modernising its approach to patient record keeping and information sharing. The trust worked with one of its technology suppliers, System C, to develop a new patient record keeping system and business intelligence platform that has changed the way staff across capture information on everything from admissions to prescriptions, and provides them with...

The Department of Health will not compel patients to use digital channels to communicate with government, says its technology head Paul Jones The government's policy of compelling citizens to contact public services through digital channels will not apply to healthcare, according to Department of Health's chief technology officer. Paul Jones, one of the architects of the health service's Information Revolution strategy, is expected to tell the Smart Healthcare Live conference this week that the Cabinet Office's "digital by default" mantra will not be imposed on NHS patients...