post conference

Well, that was a good conference. Well attended (despite the economic climate) and useful talks. Thanks to anyone who attended mine and patiently put up with me talking through a cold which still refuses to go away...Thanks also to the organising team!

Reviewing the prescribing safety settings for NVUG it is pretty clear that in all parts of the UK bar Scotland at present you are able to tweak these pretty much back to where they were prior to DLM 260. We north of the border will have to be patient till we see some relaxation of the rules.

Nice stuff coming up in Vision in the next few DLMs and I am looking forward to both the Free Text search facility and the changes to the problem management. I have largely given up on problems for the time being, but will revisit them when the changes are delivered.

SNOMED talk was also fun, but apologies to anyone who thought it might make some sense! Is SNOMED really fit for purpose? I guess the answer depends on what the purpose will be. One of the biggest difficulties with SNOMED is the lack of people in healthcare and developer communities who understand it. It is complex, perhaps necessarily so, but does the inherent complexity of it make it essentially unusable in the real world? I think we need to get end users educated in SNOMED as far as we can, as the end users can really only drive the functionality if they can understand (to an extent) the advantages and limitations of the terminology.

Anyway, feeling fairly crap with this cold and have work to do...