This was the first time we held this quarterly meeting online due to Covid19 and it was certainly a more efficient way to avoid a number of people travelling around the country!
As usual there were a number of EMIS senior managers on hand and five of the EMIS NUG committee.We discussed progress on EMIS Web enhancements, forthcoming releases and Watchdog issues of outstanding bugs in the system. We also discussed progress on EMIS-X and the revised implementation roadmap and saw some early views of the system and made some suggestions. The system will be introduced in Scotland first to fit with the contractual needs and will be brought in stage by stage next year with England to follow. A demo system will be made ready later this year and we’ll bring more news as we have it.
It is worth checking ‘Release News’ in EMIS Now to see what improvements the updates to your system you should have and what is imminent. New functionality often goes unnoticed unless you make yourself aware!
Talking of EMIS Now we spent some time discussing how it could be improved. The search functionality in particular is a real bugbear – any search seems to pull up masses of unstructured information and try to chase down what you really want and what is really important often makes you give up. We made some suggestions (following last meeting’s suggested improvements to the menu options). The underlying software is very powerful - it is used by some big banks and other large scale organisations - and it should be made to work much better: EMIS is calling in some additional help to improve it.
We feel single sign-on to EMIS Now from within EMIS Web is essential. We were told it is proving difficult but work is going on (previously we had been advised it would not be possible with EMIS Web). Also the need for people working in different organisations to be properly identified and receive updates. An App is also being developed. Your feedback is welcome and is taken forward to our meetings (use the contact form on this website or our Facebook page ).
There have been some changes ‘under the bonnet’ to EMIS Web to improve the speed of bulk prescription signing. This followed deployment of analytical software at several practices to observe and record in detail how the system responded within normal practice environments.
We were dismayed to find the RSS Feed on the EMIS Web homepage was still broken and EMIS were surprised as they though it had been fixed! It would have been so useful during the start of the pandemic. A temporary solution, until it is properly fixed, of adding the EMIS Twitter feed was proposed.
We are reinstating the monthly Watchdog catch-up online meetings (Mike Walton has take over leadership on this this following Ben Scorer’s resignation from the Committee). These will discuss with EMIS the log of common or outstanding issues. We shall continue to monitor the social media and pick up ongoing user comments, so your feedback is vital. Just to be clear, we can take up problems with EMIS if they are unresolved by the usual support system routes or are sufficiently major or systemic to be of serious concern.
We ended by thanking EMIS for the rapid deployment of system changes to help us cope with the Covid19 pandemic, which certainly made the situation much more manageable. Problems experienced such as the shielding information searches have not been of EMIS’s making; they have had to follow instructions from the centre and have made representations on users’ behalves to remedy these. EMIS certainly worked hard and we are grateful!
Next meeting in July.