Article | EMIS-X and the future of healthcare technology

Technology Director Matt Quayle, has worked in health tech for 23 years and runs one of the teams of software managers, engineers and developers working on EMIS-X®. We sat down with him to discuss the advantages of being ‘internet-first’, and why this is significant for the future healthcare.

Using modern technology, we’ve ensured EMIS-X is a product that’s super resilient and super reliable, that scales really well, performs really well and is highly secure.

Matt Quayle
Technology Director, Optum

Why is EMIS-X so important?

EMIS-X isn’t just a facelift of EMIS Web, it’s a complete transformation of the technology that underpins our systems. It’s the bedrock on which we’ll develop all our products, enabling us to deliver fast, flexible and intelligent solutions that support the future of healthcare. It’s a vast modernisation project and I’m excited that we’re supporting integrated care across many different settings. EMIS-X also provides a much better user experience, with improved functionality, workflows and user interfaces.

How is EMIS-X different from EMIS Web?

EMIS Web and EMIS-X have a common goal, using technology to enable people to provide good quality patient care, maintain good clinical records, share data safely and quickly, and make every day processes much more efficient.

The difference is that EMIS Web started construction 20 years ago, and the technology reflects that. Technology has moved forward significantly since EMIS Web was initially built. EMIS-X uses the latest advancements to provide more powerful computing and improve our ability to scale and roll out functionality more quickly than we’ve been able to before.

EMIS-X via a browser and the EMIS-X companion app are essentially the same thing, so all functionality is being built for both. The user experience is the same too, which is great for our users as they’re very busy.

We're also replacing EMIS Web technology 'under the hood' with EMIS-X, so more and more, elements of what looks like EMIS Web, is now powered by EMIS-X, which means we're able to provide improvements in speed and performance that our users will experience, without having to immediately change their workflows.

EMIS-X is what we call an ‘internet first’ system, meaning that all the infrastructure is in the cloud. It’s designed in a way that makes it expandable so that it scales to handle demands. As you put more load on the system, it’ll automatically handle that load. This results in a robust product that performs exceptionally well.

What makes ‘internet-first’ systems better?

Many older systems are what we call ‘monolithic’ applications, meaning that changes and updates are deployed all in one go across the entire thing. There’s no way to specifically select a single element, so effectively everything is live for everyone across the board. This means that changes to one small part of a system can affect other parts of it, which can be disruptive. It also means that you need to download and install a whole system every time a change has been made, even for a minor update.

EMIS-X is great because it solves this problem - everything is broken out into multiple micro services, which are restricted to a specific remit, such as appointments, clinical record or medications. Therefore, updates can be deployed independently of one another, so we can make a change to appointments without affecting clinical record, or medications to example. This reduces risk and enables us to more easily tailor modules for specific care settings.

Will EMIS-X eventually become the main system?

We’ve taken an approach of developing EMIS-X alongside EMIS Web, making the transition smoother and ensuring that our customers benefit sooner. This means that users will experience a gradual phase-out of EMIS Web as EMIS-X grows in capacity and they start benefiting from more advanced features.

Soon there’ll come a time when certain members of the team within the organisation won't need to use any aspect of EMIS Web anymore, because they can do everything they need to do using EMIS-X via a browser.

Matt Quayle
Technology Director, Optum

What about the future of technology in healthcare?

Clearly, AI will never replace a human being and the complex personal and emotional requirements of the many roles within a healthcare setting. Rather, where it can help is removing repetitive work from certain tasks and free people’s time up during the day, so they can focus on delivering an excellent service and high-quality patient care.

We’re building AI capabilities into EMIS-X and it’s all about finding valid and useful reasons to implement it, and to get it right, with governance processes, sensitivity and security at the forefront.

So, overall there’s plenty we can do within the world of technology to help the NHS be more efficient and that’s definitely the direction of travel for us.