SUCCESS STORY
AUTUMN 10 CASE STUDY 1
DOCTOR DOCTOR Ask Sean Riddell, current chief executive of EMIS Group, when he became chief executive, and he looks a bit puzzled. “I don’t want to sound blank,” he says, “but without getting my personnel file I don’t know. It’s been a while. That’s all I know.” He quickly goes on to explain that at EMIS, where he has worked for 21 years after a short spell at Provident Financial, “the company has grown up and we have all worked together”. But if you think that is a fairly typical answer from what you assume is a sleepy little healthcare technology company based in a fairly sleepy suburb of Leeds, you would be wrong. In the 20-odd years of its existence, EMIS has grown to be something of a phenomenon in providing software that is specifically designed for GPs’ surgeries. More than half of all such surgeries in the UK now use its products, and there is even an EMIS web users group which organises regularly conferences and seminars on the subject. The company employs more than 700 people, mostly in Rawdon but also in Wakefield, in Gosport and Hampshire, and now, thanks to a recent acquisition, in Hertfordshire. And Riddell claims its latest product EMIS Web which in effect takes the EMIS system into the realms of cloud computing, could really transform both the way GPs work and, more importantly, how patients are served within the NHS. The company floated on AIM earlier this ear, although this was mainly to provide a partial exit for the company’s GP founders and to incentivise staff. It raised over £50m in the process. “The web is really transformational in what you can do with healthcare,” says Riddell. “Historically, patient data was always kept in a
BUSINESS QUARTER | AUTUMN 10 BQ_MAG Issue 6.indb 78
GP’s file server, but as we know, GPs are only one part of the overall healthcare team. So, if you are seen by an out-of-hours doctor, where is your data? With a conventional system you probably wouldn’t be able to access it anyway, because it would more than likely be in another server running a back-up. So the benefits of making that data portable into what is known as cloud but which is absolutely controlled by the consent of the patient, are huge. Riddell says moving such data online also hugely increases a patient or carer’s ability to find more information out about their condition easily. He shows me one dummy EMIS Web patient’s record as an example, a child with chronic asthma. One link takes the child to a poem about Vlad the Impaler who Learned to Use his Inhaler. Another link for the child’s parents provides details of asthma support groups in the area. “There is no point giving a seven-year-old information on what happens to them during an asthma attack,” says Riddell, “but that would be useful for an adult. So would information about self-help groups,
The web is really transformational in what you can do with healthcare
78
information about what peak flow means, and even links into high-level data.” He is quick to counter suggestions that providing an uninformed public with such easy access to a wide range of web-based information would lead to a nation of hypochondriacs. If anything, he says, the opposite is the case. “Research on providing this information shows that it puts the patient’s mind at rest,” he says. “Patients can get access to information. This is actually causing fewer encounters for doctors.” Nor does he think providing a hugely increased group access to confidential patient data would necessarily increase the chances of people – insurance companies, say – being able to snoop on confidential patient data. Confidentiality, he insists again, is paramount, and if any patient requested that no-one should see the data, the system respects this. But he says it is the operators themselves – the GPs and other healthcare professionals – who are the gatekeepers, not the IT system itself. “It’s actually a question of trust,” he says. “Do you trust your GP to keep your records confidential and safe? I remember when people would not buy stuff off the internet. You do still get a degree of internet fraud, but clinical systems within NHS are actually an intranet, not at internet, so there is enhanced security. And insurance companies will do what they have always done and write to your GP. Our system doesn’t change any of that.” While EMIS Web is still very much a new product, Riddell is particularly proud of how easily GPs have been able to adapt to it. “We have just had an experience with what you could say was our most legacy product – a practice that had been using EMIS for 20 years,” he says. “They turned the old system off on a Tuesday night and started running live with EMIS Web on the Wednesday morning.” In fact, EMIS’s initial success in establishing itself as a software house back in the 1980s was probably very much down to its tagline. “It was ‘built by doctors for doctors’,” says Riddell. “That’s a trite phrase, but it goes to the heart of what EMIS did. If you looked at systems that clinicians used back then, you generally found clinicians didn’t use them.
04/10/2010 16:14