QResearch® has announced details of this year's QInnovation Award which recognises innovative research to improve the nation's health - with a grant of up to £10,000 for the winner. Now in its second year, the award is inviting entries from UK research teams involved in projects that are likely to benefit patients or improve clinical care in primary, secondary or community health.

Dr Ian Denley and Markus Bolton have unveiled Shearwater Systems, a new company established with £2.16m of initial funding to develop mobile clinical applications and health records for the UK health and social care market. Canterbury-based Shearwater Systems has already taken on 15 staff, the majority of whom are technical. The team is developing a range of healthcare IT products including the Rapport Clinical Portal and the Rapport Patient Portal.

NHS England will be joining IMS MAXIMS on stand A44 at this year's annual EHI Live conference and exhibition on November 5-6 at the NEC, Birmingham. IMS MAXIMS is one of the first suppliers in the UK to discuss an open source package for patient administration systems and electronic patient records. Delegates are invited to the stand to find out more about open source and what it could mean for them.

Following on from a successful pilot, social enterprise and NHS healthcare provider Bristol Community Health CIC has gone live with the TotalMobile™ App Platform across three of their community healthcare teams and their citywide phlebotomy service. The TotalMobile App, a mobile workflow management solution, allows Healthcare Professionals to spend less time on administration and travel, and more with patients.

The College of Emergency Medicine claims A&E departments have become "like warzones," while the Care Quality Commission has admitted that in some parts of England, emergency care is now "out of control." At Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, however, innovative technology developed with Caradigm is helping to support the hospital's A&E department in the daily management of these challenges.

Scotland's pioneering Digital Health Institute was officially launched in Edinburgh to an audience of leading figures in the global healthcare sector and multi-national technology companies. The DHI, a collaborative partnership between public and private organisations, brings together the country's leading health and care operators and engages technology businesses across Europe, the United States and Asia to speed up research and development in order to produce innovative new technologies that will transform the quality of people's lives and help Scotland become an exporter of world-leading products and services.

Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is providing its healthcare professionals with access to a new, interactive online training solution from Elsevier that enables staff to improve patient care and record their annual learning. The trust has implemented the online training tool following a needs analysis carried out after the Francis Report.