York venture to improve the NHS (From York Press)

York venture to improve the NHS

11:51am Wednesday 11th March 2009 in Search By Ron Godfrey

TWO York businesses have created a new organisation to improve the nation’s health.

RedBlack Software, of King’s House, in King Street, and CMA Associates, of Bishopthorpe, have formed Prosum Alliance, a new company that delivers software to hospitals and National Health Service organisations – software that measures the effectiveness of NHS initiatives.

Prosum Alliance’s Prosum solution is supporting a pioneering NHS scheme in Yorkshire. Yorkshire and Humber Strategic Health Authority is running a pilot project to establish a common approach to benefits management on behalf of the rest of the country.

The project focuses on a local health community in Bradford which is scheduled to start using Prosum software in April.

The NHS is subject to a multitude of directives and targets from the Department of Health. Prosum Alliance aims to revolutionise the way NHS managers measure the benefits of these initiatives.

Until now, there has been no consolidated way for NHS organisations to monitor when changes have delivered improvement, demonstrate that they are providing a safe and effective service, report on whether initiatives have made improvements against health outcomes or accurately measure such improvements against agreed targets.

Instead of dealing with disparate, often paper-based, information from multiple sources relating to numerous mandates, Prosum allows users to define easily the outcomes and benefits they are interested in, capture data about them and measure them in a meaningful way.

Humber Mental Health Teaching Trust was the first NHS organisation to install the Prosum benefits management software in October and managers have declared it to be a success.

CMA Associates delivers high-quality support and management to the UK’s healthcare market.

RedBlack Software, The Press’s Science and Technology Business Of The Year in 2006, develops and delivers business management systems to more than 100 organisations in the UK.

Mark Limber, of CMA Associates, said Prosum Alliance, which is registered at Redblack’s headquarters, was a good marriage between two local companies, “We are very much focused on delivering services and improvements into the NHS and RedBlack is a very well-known software company in York focused on rapid, successful software development.”

Jane Tyler, RedBlack Software’s managing director, said: “We have relished the challenge of creating a tool that can be so useful to the NHS, which is, after all, Europe’s biggest business.”