By Rok Vrbica, CEO of CodeMonkee.
PHR (personal health record) is a health record where health data of a patient is maintained by the patient. Majority of today’s solutions are web-based applications. While mobile apps are focused mainly on a single problem, web solutions are comprehensive PHRs.

By Shane Tickell, CEO of IMS MAXIMS.
A year ago I declared that IMS MAXIMS was considering making its MAXIMS PAS and EPR available as an open source solution to the NHS. At that point, we were "far from committed to the model" but were engaging with our customers, sounding out the market and getting to grips with the benefits for both IMS MAXIMS and the wider health economy.

By Malcolm Senior, director of informatics at Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust.
"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black" were the famous words by Henry Ford, one of the first to master the principles of mass production. Over a century later, you can buy a car in nearly any colour you want, complete with a range of ‘mod cons’, through a financial package tailored to your affordability.

By Colin Reid, CEO, TotalMobile.
As care continues to shift further away from the hospital environment to a more local setting, it has never been more important to find innovative solutions to boost productivity for staff working in the community. Yet, as profound technology advances continue to revolutionise the way we conduct our lives, from online banking to Internet shopping, it seems that the NHS is failing to keep up.

By Angela White, Medical Director, IMS MAXIMS.
Without a detailed understanding of the NHS, you could be forgiven for thinking that the global financial crisis and government's austerity measures were somehow responsible for the financial crisis and the capacity gap that the NHS faces. But nothing could be further from the truth, which is that there has ALWAYS been a gap between demand for healthcare and capacity to deliver AND the gap has increased year on year; and increasing financial input, unless directed very strategically, has historically not addressed the gap.

By Shane Tickell, CEO, IMS MAXIMS.
In the late 1980s, after the NHS started going through its largest period of change, I began working for a women and children's hospital, which was part of a larger group. At this time we were using a workflow system that was locally hosted on our site, however you could centrally report on all the individual hospitals. Despite being able to successfully administer our patients, manage our stock control, procedures and billing, we were missing the detailed patient notes - which were on paper.

By Dr Joel Ratnasothy, Medical Director EMEA for Caradigm.
The problem is that a portal in a healthcare IT context is a loosely defined term to describe a web page that displays information retrieved from other systems. The systems it connects are ideally 'Best of Breed' applications that manage specific clinical tasks such as medical imaging or blood sample testing. But the broader IT industry no longer talks about web portals, but it is talking about ‘big data’.