Continua Health Alliance announced that Elinaz Mahdavy, European Affairs and Strategic Partnerships Manager at Orange Healthcare, has been unanimously elected chair of its European Working Group. Elinaz will lead Continua's outreach and relations with EU institutions and government entities in Europe. She succeeds Mário Romão, senior policy manager at Intel, who will continue to serve as vice chair.

By Dr. Paul Shannon, consultant anaesthetist in the NHS and medical director at CSC.
Many of the issues identified at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust could be seen at any hospital in the NHS. The overwhelming message of Francis was the need for 'cultural change' in the NHS. However, this is a tall order since the NHS doesn't so much have a culture, it is a culture and it's the individuals within the organisation that make up that culture.

Stalis and IPROS CUBE have announced a partnership to launch a Patient Experience feedback module. This new solution will bring together a blend of technology expertise for healthcare providers to manage, monitor and analyse online patient experience surveys to support performance measurements and delivery of quality service improvements in line with government targets.

Shearwater Healthcare Solutions, the business accelerator founded by Ian Denley and Markus Bolton, has made a major investment in Graphnet Health, the UK's leading supplier of IT solutions for shared health and social care records. Graphnet's CareCentric solutions are used by over 30,000 NHS and local authority staff, and hold data on over 17m UK citizens.

IMS MAXIMS has announced that it has been shortlisted as a finalist in the 'Technology provider of the year' category for the HealthInvestor Awards 2013. The prestigious HealthInvestor awards recognise innovation in the healthcare sector and celebrate excellence in a wide range of categories from complex care provider of the year to diagnostics provider of the year.

Kent Community Health NHS Trust (KCHT), one of the largest community service providers in the UK employing in the region of 5,400 staff, has selected Advanced Community, a sophisticated community healthcare system from Advanced Health & Care (Advanced). The contract will run for a minimum of three years.

By Julian Osborne, IMS MAXIMS.
The last month saw the major NHS systems' integration and IT services provider, 2e2, go into administration. The company has faced a turbulent time over the last twelve months and there were indications of future trouble.