The Royal College of Ophthalmologists and Medisoft shortlisted for prestigious EHI Award
18 August 2015
The Royal College of Ophthalmologists (RCOphth) and Medisoft are pleased to announce that the National Ophthalmology Database Audit (NOD Audit) project has been shortlisted for the EHI Awards, the UK’s only dedicated healthcare IT award scheme.
The project team presented their award entry into the category of ‘Best use of IT to support integrated healthcare services’ to the judges on 15 July 2015. The category is for those organisations and partnerships that have shown innovation in ‘outstanding informatics work which enables information to be shared safely, legally and ethically across boundaries within healthcare organisations and between agencies providing patient care.’ Ultimately, the award celebrates how healthcare information has been integrated through the use of IT and communications for improved patient care.
Beth Barnes, Head of Professional Standards at RCOphth and Christian Martin, Managing Director of Medisoft Limited, presented the key aims of the NOD Audit project. Medisoft, in partnership with RCOphth, have developed an IT based system allowing community optometrists to record cataract follow-up data electronically and link pre-surgery and post-surgical data. The patient’s hospital eye services procedure record is connected with their follow up care from their community optometrist. This rarely happens currently.
John Sparrow, Clinical Lead – National Ophthalmology Database Audit Project, said ‘I am delighted that the hard work of the team has been recognised in this way. The College aims for the highest achievable standards of eye care for patients. The NOD Audit project will enable the collection of nationally agreed cataract surgery data which is key to measuring and therefore improving the quality of this life-changing procedure. We are encouraging Trusts, clinical leads and ophthalmic partners to get involved in the audit.’
Christian Martin commented, ‘Medisoft are proud to have been recognised for our innovative web-based system which supports the capture of patient outcomes in the community. Good patient outcomes, both individually and at a population level, depend on the efficient and accurate transfer of information about the patient and their treatment. We are particularly pleased to have developed a system which allows accredited non-NHS professionals to share clinical information with hospitals without the need for expensive and complex infrastructure. We are delighted to be shortlisted for this award alongside the College and look forward to the wider roll-out of the project over the coming months.’
The 12 category winners will be announced at the Park Plaza, Westminster on Thursday 1 October 2015.
Notes to editors
Every year, over 300,000 patients in England alone receive NHS cataract surgery – the most commonly performed surgical procedure in the UK. Nearly all are followed up by community optometrists (high-street opticians), but the results of the follow-up are rarely compared with the patient’s vision before surgery. Information governance concerns have hindered the development of a joined-up system. Medisoft has developed an innovative PIN-based approach that avoids any patient-identifiable data being exposed on the public Internet.
The NOD Audit project was commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) as part of the National Clinical Audit Programme. The project will be delivered over three years (2014 – 2017) and will further develop and utilise validated quality standards to benchmark cataract surgery outcomes between centres and individual surgeons across England and Wales.
The analysis of the data from NHS funded cataract surgery centres in England and Wales will be completed by the NOD Delivery Unit, and will help hospital eye service teams (HES) understand performance levels of cataract surgery undertaken and include leading causes of complications and adverse visual outcomes, both at a local and national level.
About Medisoft
Medisoft’s vision is to transform the practice of ophthalmology by means of advanced technology. Medisoft was founded in 1997 by Robert Johnston, a consultant ophthalmologist, and his brother David Johnston, who brought commercial and marketing experience from the pharmaceutical industry. They combined their knowledge to form a software company with the sole focus of ophthalmology. Their award-winning electronic medical record (EMR) system supports every aspect of ophthalmic assessment and treatment.
Continuous development over two decades has made Medisoft one of the world’s leading EMRs. Medisoft designs, develops and supports software, which is currently used by over 150 hospitals globally.