SCATA - UK Society for Computing and Technology in Anaesthesia

SCATA Members Newsletter November 2023

Dear SCATA Member

Grant Application

Last month, we supported new member Jamie Humphreys with costs toward a project to develop an open-source pEEG monitor.

If you have a project that you'd like SCATA to support, or read about the kinds of projects that are eligible, please have a look at the grant application form.

GASPIN Project (Generic Anaesthesia Speech Interface)

"..with existing AIMS there is a conflict of attention between using the information system and observing the patient. Keyboards, mice and touchscreen all require the use of hands, whereas speech interfaces are hands-free and allow simultaneous multitasking. You can talk about intubation while you are actually doing it."

Excerpt from Martin Gardner's notes on the possibility of developing a speech interface for anaesthesia. Read the full paper here.

STA Speaker Exchange - Houston Invitation

Interested in sponsored attendance at an STA meeting in the United States? The STA are inviting a SCATA member to speak at their conference in Houston in January. Interested members can reply to this email with a proposed topic. Support from SCATA and the STA is available to cover travel, accommodation and conference registration. Last year, trainee member James Selby attended the STA meeting in Las Vegas and wrote a short blog post about it.

Logbook Standards

SCATA have been invited by the Royal College of Anaesthetists to draft a set of technical minimum standards for how an acceptable logbook functions. These will be published via our fledgling Guidelines & Standards project. Members with an interest in logbooks are welcome to contribute to this project: please contact JP on Slack or via email.

SNOMED Anesthesia Clinical Reference Group

There are a number of active topics on the group's Confluence page - only titles are visible in the public facing site, but please get in touch if you'd like to join the discussion, or join the group.

HL7-FHIR Implementation Guide for Anesthesia

The Project Plan has been added to recently, with prototype 'wiring diagrams' for the Procedure and DeviceUsage FHIR resources, in a very simple use case. The sample Implementation Guide (IG) from HL7's GitHub repo was forked and used as the basis for our Anesthesia IG. Initially, this is to allow Martin and Grant to become familiar with the IG tooling that requires a number of components, including Java and Ruby/Jekyll for publication.

Livedrive Report

Liverdrive accounts were reviewed to ensure that all users have an active SCATA subscription. Some accounts were closed due to inactivity. A reminder that as a SCATA member, you are entitled to a free subscription to Livedrive which is a cloud-based file storage utility.

Committee Roles and Vacancies

James Selby and Cyrus Razavi obtained their CCTs and have vacated their trainee committee posts to become Ordinary Members for three-year terms. This leaves one vacancy on the trainee sub-committee. We also have vacancies for Secretary and RCoA liaison.

New Members

We haven't been very good at welcoming new members this year, so here's a quick rundown of who's joined since the start of 2023:

February - Dominic Allen (trainee member)
May - Gareth Kitchen (full member)
July - Rob Falconer and Jamie Humphreys (retired and trainee)
October - Toni Brunning (full)
Novermber - Rob Penders (trainee)

Welcome to all of you.

Faculty of Clinical Informatics conference

Finally, we will be attending the FCI conference in Manchester on 29th and 30th November: if any SCATA members are also attending, please do get in touch so we can meet up.

JP Lomas, Chairman

Grant Forrest, President

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