UK govt drives IT programme

The UK Department of Health (DOH) is accelerating its national programme for IT, says Trading Markets.

The DOH's director-general for Informatics, Christine Connelly, set out a number of key proposals, including opening up the IT market with a procurement process for hospital trusts in the South of England.

The computing marketplace will also be boosted by the provision of a DOH toolkit which will allow new products to be developed locally, accredited centrally and linked to existing deployments of information systems such as Cerner and Lorenzo. It is envisaged that work on this toolkit will be complete by March 2010.

The University of Aberdeen in the US has been awarded £12.4 million (R157 million) in funding over five years to investigate how advances in digital technologies can transform rural communities, society and business, states Public Technology.

The funding from the Research Councils UK's Digital Economy Programme, led by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, is the largest single externally funded grant to be received by the university, and will create 60 new jobs and studentships.

The Rural Digital Economy Research Hub will conduct research and development into digital technologies to enhance how crucial services such as healthcare and transport are delivered in rural areas across the UK.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is looking to boost its market share in animation and medical services in India by signing a strategic technology alliance with FXLabs, says The Hindu.

FXLabs will deploy the latest ATI FirePro series of workstation graphics technology for the development of its upcoming games and provide a test base consisting of AMD's Radeon series of consumer graphics processors.

AMD senior director of professional graphics, Janet Matsuda, says the alliance is the beginning of a key area of focus for AMD and the company is hopeful that its agreement with FXLabs will have a cascading effect.