Medilogik was again at the British Society of Gastroenterology conference in June. EMS Product Owner Thomas Wareing reflects on five ‘hot topics’ from the event and how customer feedback will help to shape Medilogik EMS.
The conference was held in the Liverpool docks, and it was hot! As we arrived to set-up the Medilogik stand on Monday, the heat was building. By the time the show closed on Thursday, red warnings had been issued and then extended for much of the south of England.
Fortunately, the exhibition hall was cool, and we were able to spend four days tuning in to the conference agenda, meeting other suppliers, and having some great conversations with customers.
Cool system: For anybody who wasn’t at the show and doesn’t know us: Medilogik EMS is a cloud-based endoscopy management system. It can be integrated with electronic patient records and booking and scheduling tools to help professionals stratify waiting lists and manage waiting times.
It allows reports to be created in minutes and sent directly to consultants, GPs, and colleagues. It enables clinical quality audit and performance reports to be created and uploads data direct to the National Endoscopy Database (NED).
We are proud that 100% of our customers are contributing live data to NEDi2.1, which in turn supports the endoscopy trainees’ ePortfolio, JETS. Even so, customers had plenty of ideas for improvements to address the pressures they are facing and some of the “hot topics” at the show.
Hot topic, productivity: I joined Medilogik six months ago from Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, where I was an operations manager and spent three years leading operational functions in endoscopy.
My background means I know all about the stress the NHS is under, and the need to maintain throughput; to keep getting patients booked onto the list. Even so, it was striking that the need to improve productivity was a major topic of conversation.
In my new role, I’ve been working with the Medilogik development team to deliver better productivity data. At Shrewsbury and Telford, I produced my own dashboards, and now I’m looking at how we can really get into the granularity of what drives operational performance.
Phase 1 is almost complete, making it much easier to support and develop further. We had a development site on the stand, and we’re going to be working on that, using the feedback we received.
Hot topic, productivity (again): Another aspect of productivity that came up a lot is how we can streamline the pre-assessment process and make sure that patients are ready for their procedure and won’t have to cancel at the last minute.
Many trusts are still using multi-page paper documents for pre-assessment and manually entering data into the electronic patient records and endoscopy systems. We would like to offer our customers a digital pre-assessment process, with data that integrates with Medilogik EMS, so it is available to schedulers and clinicians on the day.
Hot topic, AI: There is no getting away from debate about the impact that artificial intelligence is going to have on the economy and public services right now, so it was no surprise that it was a hot topic at BSG Live’26.
In radiology, AI is starting to become accepted in two main areas: as a tool to help clinicians to triage and read scans and as a “scribe” that can help to capture consultations and produce documentation. In endoscopy, though, it is still quite new.
At Medilogik, what we want to do is to take a step back, and to work out where AI can best be used along the patient pathway, keeping in mind that imperative to improve throughput, while maintaining the quality of our work and reporting, which is already highly structured.
Hot topic, staffing and training: Staff shortages, and the need to help more young people to train as endoscopists, have been an issue for so long that it is hard to describe them as a “hot topic.”
However, the issue still came up at the show. As mentioned above, Medilogik EMS is accredited for the latest version of the NED, which means we can also share data with the JETS database.
In endoscopy departments that don’t use our system, trainees may still need to download and then re-upload documentation to JETS. It was good to hear from customers that we are, at least, making it a little bit easier for them to meet their training requirements.
Hot topic, the heat: Fortunately, the heatwave didn’t have a huge impact on BSG Live’26, but towards the end of the week the media was starting to report that trusts were struggling. Some hospitals had to declare critical incidents in the face of higher levels of demand and cooling system failures that impacted their imaging and IT systems.
That put climate change firmly back on the agenda. JAG has a green endoscopy working group and has included some practical measures to reduce the environmental impact of the service into its accreditation process. One of the issues it has identified is printing or, rather, not printing images and reports.
Because Medilogik is built to integrate with the trust integration systems that bring together other core systems, we can make sure that outputs are handled electronically, whether they are being sent to the EPR, to a GP, or to a patient via the NHS App. It’s a small thing, but a lot of small things add up to big wins.
Reflections: I have been to plenty of conferences as an operational manager, but I’d never been to BSG before, and this was my first conference in my new role.
BSG certainly lived up to expectations, and it was a pleasure to meet so many customers and former colleagues. I loved that the guys from Shrewsbury and Telford came to the stand with a whole list of small ideas to improve the overall user experience – all of which have been followed up with our support team
One way and another, I’ve come back to the office with a list of around 20 development requirements, which I’m also working through with the team. We’re going to be following up with a piece of “you said: we listened” work. Watch this space!
