NHS chief executive David Nicholson has warned that lower funding increases combined with rising demand could leave the NHS facing a £20billion budget deficit over five years.

As Sean Riddell, EMIS managing director, argues in his article in this sponsored feature, information sharing is becoming ever more important as health communities seek to roll out Lord Darzi's agenda of delivering care closer to home.

This feature, sponsored by EMIS, takes the debate a step further by arguing that interoperability is also vital to providing the very best patient care.

This feature, sponsored by EMIS, considers how UK healthcare might achieve its long-held ambition of creating a comprehensive, longitudinal EHR. It considers how EMIS’s next generation software, EMIS Web, is moving towards this goal.

Technology to support patients living with long term conditions is in the news with the recent announcement of three sites to pilot telecare and telemonitoring. It's little wonder there is so much interest from providers and suppliers.

Leading GP software supplier EMIS is thinking big at HC2007 - Europe's largest health informatics conference, which takes place in Harrogate this month.

In this feature, 1st Retinal Screen examines the key issues in Diabetic Retinopathy Screening, discusses how they can be overcome and provides examples from PCTs that have been successful in meeting these targets.

This special feature examines how the Qute programme will not only offer GPs an easy way of reconciling bills from secondary care trusts with their own record of patient referrals but also ultimately save them money.

First DataBank Europe examines the key elements of their involvement with NHS Connecting for Health - enabling safer prescribing, dispensing and improved patient care through the provision of drug related clinical decision support.

In this feature, produced with Codegate, suppliers of the LabelTrace system developed by QuickTrace, we discuss how automating label production can lead to dramatic improvements in accuracy and turnaround.

Articles looking at how organisations can better manage their data warehouses; how they can handle migration of legacy data; and how they can deliver search tools to help all staff find and use data more effectively.

Making information flow smoothly between different health and social care agencies is a shared goal around the globe and this feature profiles some UK services that have made it happen by working in collaboration with specialists in4tek.

This feature, produced with Stalis Ltd, argues that healthcare organisations need to look long and hard at the quality of the data they propose to migrate into the new, integrated systems and speed up their plans.

Is practice-based commissioning (PBC) the pill that will shrink the near-£800m NHS deficit, or will it cause an adverse reaction? Whatever your view, the drive for universal coverage of PBC is under way and accelerating toward the December 2006 deadline.

In this feature, sponsored by Philips, we look at the role digital dictation and speech recognition can play in reducing the strain on the healthcare system's financial and human resources.

PCS Web - a groundbreaking new e-record system that gives everyone in the primary care team instant online access to patients' records - is being piloted in three PCTs in England from next month.

E-Health Insider is pleased to join forces with First DataBank Europe for this feature focusing on clinical decision support, exploring both a variety of current issues and the future potential of clinical decision support to make healthcare safer.

E-Health Insider and Telewest Business have created this feature which gives the background to the targets for efficiency gains, provides examples of NHS organisations that have used ICT to make gains and offers 10 top tips for boosting productivity.

The traditional GP's surgery is changing. From internet appointment booking to fingerprint recognition technology in the waiting room, a new breed of electronic services is starting to transform doctors' - and patients' - lives.