SCATA - UK Society for Computing and Technology in Anaesthesia

SCATA Members Newsletter November 2020

Welcome to the November edition of the SCATA update newsletter. We hope members are safe and well in these strange times.

#gashack

Our planned second outing to the RCoA co-running a hack event was upset by the pandemic but the Society decided to press ahead with an online event running on a combination of Zoom and Slack. With 20 attendees, 12 projects were pitched on the Saturday after which five project teams were formed to work on projects over the weekend:

Logbook Standards
Personalised CT Risk
Secure Data Entry
SBAR/Handover tool
Drug ID study

Interspersed with the group working were a series of ‘Lightning Talks’ on diverse topics from Ethical Hacking to bootstrapping a pandemic ventilator via interrogation of the hospital bleep system.

On Sunday, all groups presented their work to the rest of the attendees and were subsequently asked to vote on their favourite results to share in the SCATA prize fund.

It’s our pleasure to announce that the Secure Data Entry project, led by Nick Lown, and the Personalised CT Risk project, led by Sandy Davey, were voted as the winning projects. Congratulations to all teams for what was a productive and entertaining weekend all around, albeit in strange Zoom online circumstances.

Feedback from attendees has reassured the SCATA Committee that it was certainly a worthwhile endeavour in pressing ahead with the event.

Watch this space for the next SCATA hack event, while summaries of the projects will hopefully be appearing in the Christmas SCATA newsletter.

Around and about

openEHR 2020 Digital Event titled “Data for life”, will be held on Tuesday, 24 November. Join renowned opinion leaders such as Robert Wachter, MD, Mike Jones from the Gartner Group, Aloha McBride from EY, and several other interesting speakers who will discuss the opportunities and new ideas in digital health with a focus on openEHR. Also on the programme is John Meredith from NHS Wales whom some may remember from our SCATA meeting in Cardiff in 2018.
In their annual report on the healthcare hype cycle, Gartner have highlighted the importance of the digital health platform approach. Hype Cycle tracks the most significant IT directions in applications, analytics and systems relevant to the healthcare provider enterprise. Although the methodology has been criticised for a lack of evidence that it matches uptake of technology in the real world, there are still some interesting points made.
This video (“Computer Bugs in Hospitals: A New Killer” from Professor Martyn Thomas CBE and Professor Harold Thimbleb) was passed on via Twitter and is recommended if you have a spare hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seyaYL2ou14&feature=youtu.be

Close

As always, we’re happy to hear from members and publicise any activities or events around digital healthcare or technology: do get in touch!

Stay safe, and see you in December.

JP Lomas (@jplomas)
Chairman

Grant Forrest (@digitalgasdoc)
President

Twitter: @scata_uk