AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

1. Leeds Student Medical Practice AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE INTRANET Creating an for your practice

2. Leeds Student Medical Practice 1 • TODAY’S PRESENTATION • Who am I? AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE • Andrew Walsham IT & Data Quality Manager • Formal training in computer programming and the application of small business software • Deputy Practice Manager for 2yrs (12,000 pts) • Practice Manager for 11yrs (5,500 pts) • At LSMP for the last 3yrs (30,000 pts) • Responsible for 60 PCs & 3 servers, computer training, web site & Intranet, the summarising and data entry team, and a few other things!

3. Leeds Student Medical Practice 1 • TODAY’S PRESENTATION • Who am I? • What is an Intranet? • The benefits • Design choices(structure, format, software, printing) • Enhancements(search engine, file downloads, clever coding) AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

4. Leeds Student Medical Practice 2 WHAT IS AN INTRANET? Essentially it is a way of using computers to share your policies, protocols, documentation, and information with everyone inside your surgeryThe software and principles are the same as those used on the Internet AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

5. Leeds Student Medical Practice 3 • THE BENEFITS • Everyone always has access to the most up to date information • Allows targeted self help to be printed according to the patient’s needs • In conjunction with e-mail allows links to documents to be sent, for example; “new Consultation Mode macros now available, click to open instructions, click to download the macros” • Reduces; photocopying, waste paper, out of date documents, wondering where papers are filed AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

6. Leeds Student Medical Practice 4 • MORE BENEFITS • You always have access to the same information whichever room you happen to be in • Patients will be impressed • Very helpful resource for new personnel • ANY DISADVANTAGES? • A small surgery might not have someone with the expertise to create and maintain the Intranet AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

7. Leeds Student Medical Practice 5 • LSMP’s INTRANET HISTORY • Version 1 – Digerati • Free from the NHS • Required some effort to set up • Runs on an Access database • Easy to use, and allows users to upload files themselves • Fairly inflexible design (APSs) • www.nhsia.nhs.uk/digerati AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

8. Leeds Student Medical Practice 6 • LSMP’s INTRANET HISTORY • Version 2 – EMIS Intranet • We were a test site for an early development version, but quickly abandoned it because: • Each bug that was fixed created two more! • It only ran for a few days between crashes • Wholly inflexible design • Still available? www.emis-online.com AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

9. Leeds Student Medical Practice 7 LSMP’s INTRANET HISTORY Version 3 – DIY by me! After a couple of hours spent reading “Learn HTML in a weekend” I managed to write a Home Page, and hang a few other pages from that. My success convinced me I could create our own Intranet HTML is a programming language which most Internet web pages and Intranets are written with AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

10. Leeds Student Medical Practice 8 HTML Accordingly I recommend using What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) software, rather than trying to write in raw HTML AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

11. Leeds Student Medical Practice 9 LET’S TAKE A TOUR 10 minute LSMP Intranet tour Assuming you want to create your own Intranet, where to begin? AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

12. Leeds Student Medical Practice 10 • DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS - STRUCTURE • Task 1 was to spend a couple of hours determining the structure on paper… • In-House (split into 19 clinical domains and 2 administrative) • www.Links (split into 19 clinical domains and 1 administrative) • News (Weather, current practice news, and a link to every document added since day one) • Telephone (6 essential directories) • Patient Advice (printable patient leaflets) AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

13. Leeds Student Medical Practice 11 DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS - SOFTWARE Dreamweaver MX is the best, £360 retail, or £90 on an educational (University) licence. Mid-range would be Microsoft Front Page at £150 Most monthly computer magazines include free trial versions of web design software I started out using Microsoft Publisher, which is simple to use, but later discovered it had inserted HTML code which is not compliant with current best practise (not a big problem for the Intranet, but useless for my web site which must comply with disability discrimination guidelines) AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

14. Leeds Student Medical Practice 12 DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS - HARDWARE Reasonably fast PC with 512K RAM, £300 Memory is important as you tend to run several pieces of software at the same time when creating pages, for example: Dreamweaver, Internet Explorer, Scanning software, Paintshop, EMIS, Outlook Scanner, £50, aim for a higher resolution than you get with the combined scanner/printers – essential for Optical Character Recognition AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

15. Leeds Student Medical Practice 13 DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS – SERVER We used an old EMIS server set up so that it operates as a dedicated Intranet Server. This was not a simple process, but does mean we can leave it running 365 days a year Typing http://intranetbdc on any PC gives us direct access to our Intranet It is simpler to keep the Intranet files on any PC which is running whenever the building is open. This has the benefit of letting you use a fast PC (our old EMIS server can almost be classed as antique). In Internet Explorer:File, Open, Browse across the network to the PC with your Intranet on, select the index.htm file, then Tools, Internet Options, Use Current AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE

16. Leeds Student Medical Practice 14 DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS – PAGE SETUP AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE • FRAMES • More difficult to learn, but great when printing • But, will be phased out on web sites in a couple of years • TABLES • Easier to create the pages and ensure your links go to the desired places • Max graphic width <650 pixels for perfect printing

17. Leeds Student Medical Practice 15 DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS – CLARITY AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE Spend a bit of time early on developing a clean structured look for your web pages, and stay consistent with colours, fonts, and font sizes

18. Leeds Student Medical Practice 16 DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS – CLARITY AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE Limit yourself to using no more than two or three core colours across the Intranet for emphasis Although Serif fonts are easy to read when printed, they are difficult to read on-screen. I’ve used Arial for all text, changing between sizes -1, 0, +1 where appropriate for titles etc. This is easy to read both on-screen and printed Find a web site you like the look of and base your Intranet design upon that, for example: www.leeds.ac.uk/lsmp !!! Don’t go crazy with graphics, just use them where essential and relevant, and check they print clearly

19. Leeds Student Medical Practice 17 CREATING A PAGE – MY PROCESS AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE • Open Dreamweaver • Identify where the new page will live, and create a new directory if necessary • Open an existing page from near by • Change the titles, and save with a new file name in the desired location • Acquire the content – either by scanning and OCR, or scanning a picture, or a screen print • Format into the new page (& run spell check!) • Add links to the category menu & News page • Open the Intranet and test the page is accessible from the menu and News page, and that it prints cleanly

20. Leeds Student Medical Practice 18 ENHANCEMENTS AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE It is surprisingly simple to put files onto your Intranet which can be downloaded by users. Adobe PDF files are a common example, but we also provide EMIS macro sets, Outlook files such as Calendar Events and a Contact list containing all LSMP personnel A search facility will improve the usability of your site, particularly as it grows. The cheapest I found is from www.orangevalley.co.uk £25. A little fiddly to install, and not in the ranks of Google, but good enough for our Intranet

21. Leeds Student Medical Practice 19 MORE ENHANCEMENTS AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE • Have a look around for interesting and free HTML code. Here are some examples I’ve used: • Code which randomly changes the picture on the left menu every time you open our Intranet • Code which scrolls the date (or a message of your choice) along the bottom tool bar • Code which inserts today’s date onto our patient information sheet telling them when to contact us for blood test results • http://javascript.internet.com

22. Leeds Student Medical Practice 20 Summary We started small, and now, almost 3 years later our Intranet has grown to 723 pages, comprising a remarkable 2,218 files and images The most frequently used sections are the leaflets in Patient Advice, and the News Page (for the week’s weather) So, give it a go – what’s the worst That can happen? AN INTRANET FOR YOUR PRACTICE