- Who we are? CEMbooks was produced by IED Ltd. IED Ltd was setup in 2009 to explore the opportunities associated with the new iPhone and app market. The aim was to build apps that helped clinicians. Dr Haidar Samiei and Dr Brad Wilson, two ED Consultants in West Yorkshire, got together with their friends designer Kevin Taylor and coder Bryan Turnock with the plan of building and releasing apps. The first successful release was Paeds ED, a Paediatric formulary which helped with dose calculations for paediatric patients.
- However a daily problem for us as clinicians working in the ED was how we recorded the daily demand and capacity issues in the ED. There wasn’t arecord for what we’d done running the ED. Individual patients had clinical records, but what about the department overall? If we got a call after working the weekend to ask what had happened to 4hr performance, where was the record of the events, staffing and decisions that had been taken? We needed somewhere to store and easily access all of our guidelines, to know who was responsible for them, who should be reviewing and updating them and when, where we could put phone numbers so we didn’t need to ring the switchboard or use outdated laminated phone lists on the wall. A staffing board may show what the staffing was today, but it is wiped clean at the end of the day. So we set about – building a product to help with these problems.
- It started with NHSBAR – SBAR being situation, background, assessment and recommendation/response a simple system for logging information.
Once we could identify key themes that impacted on the department they became our Key Performance indicators – KPIs – for example the number of patients in resus or the number of patients waiting for a bed. We gave these KPIs a RAG rating. NHSBar evolved into my-ied which included a repository for resources , a phone book and the Captains log where the shift reports were kept.
- CEMBooks V1 was born in 2014 as the next iteration anduilt as a web app and ios App. Ourfirst customers in Leeds and Bradford followed shortly after. Further sales locally and then a key sale to Oxford University Hospitals ED which subsequently saw sites along the Thames Valley using the product through word of mouth sales. The increased revenue was put directly back into the product and CEMBooks V2 was brought to life.
- By this point we recognised the requirements for a KPI rating system that was in line with NHS Opel scoring and the development of an API was crucial to allow system integration with EPRs which had seen real growth through the last part of the 2010s.
- A product with a richer set of features required a bigger team to be able to build and maintain the system so we partnered with Synnous to support the build.. It was also apparent we needed to consider a far wider range of regulatory and safety considerations in terms of user and clinical data,data protection, procurement frameworks and cyber security. We also needed guidance around business growth and development so we partnered with Piper Health to support the company’s ambitions in this direction. In the last 12 months we have started to work with Silver Buckto expand our social media presence and product visibility.
- We continue to invest the turnover from sales into new use cases and product features. This year we launched our Tasks module to help replace those paper jobs lists that plague many ED or assessment areas and can make it hard to keep a track on the timeliness of direct care delivery.
- Working alongside our suppliers, partners and our customers we continue in our aim to solve those clinical operational issues where we feel things could just be done that little bit better.
- As individuals we have all learnt and grown so much through the last 10 years from the experience we’ve had building CEMBooks. It’s a journey that’s well worth taking and where we can, we’re happy to discuss and support others starting down that road.
- If you’ve got any questions or queries or would like to speak to one of our team please visit the website at www.cembooks.com or get in touch through @CEMBooks on X or our CEMBooks LinkedIn page.