Meditel (stub)

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Meditel (AAH Meditel?) was an early GP computing system used in the United Kingdom. The company was originally focusing on provision of television screens in GP practice waiting rooms, but pivoted to a GP computing system as business PCs became smaller, cheaper and more commonplace.

By 1989, it had 1000 practices and the company had grown from eight to 250 people [1].

Notable individuals

  • Ewan Davis (MD)

  1. https://www.digitalhealth.net/2024/03/uk-health-it-community-loses-one-of-its-brightest-and-warmest-stars/#:~:text=By%201989%2C%20it%20had%201000%20practices%20and%20the%20company%20had%20grown%20from%20eight%20to%20250%20people ↩︎

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Stuggling to edit the wiki - apologies - I’ve started here - there is a lot which I need to try and find references for but it might act as a catalyst for some of the other people close at the time…

Meditel was set up by Wally Davis (the father of Ewan Davis) The company was originally the Bureau of Medical Practice Affaires. It forcussed initially on the provision of printed materials to practices about ‘computerisation’ and other significan issues in the GP world of the late 1970s and early 1980s. They pivoted in the mid 1980’s to focusing on provision of television screens in GP practice waiting rooms using BBC Model B micro-computers. At he end of the micros for GP scheme [ref needed], they then briefly pivoted to being a GP computing system system integrator. They then acquired the rights to the Abies GP system (Run at that tie by Tim Bernson, David Markwell and James Read and built around a 4GL Sculptor on Microsoft Xenix) as one of the two vendors (GPRD neé Vision neé VAMP was the other one) providing ‘free’ multi-user computer systems to GP surgeries in return for ‘anonymised’ data. They worked together on the migration of Abies Version 4 (4.1.8 was the last release) into Meditel System 5 which was stil built on Sculptor 4GL and running on Xenix (then owned by the Santa Cuiz Organisation - SCO ) . Allied Anthracite Holdings (AAH) a pharmaceutical supplier became a major partner and funder. System 5 was developed considerably at this time with the addition of the SOPHIE interative and scripted template system written by Dr. Peter Johnson. AAH Meditel took forward the development and eventual release of a completely new System 6000 GP system which built on the Problem Oriented concepts of System 5 . It was Windows 3 thick client with a Unix file server written in ‘C++’. AAH Meditel were subsequently acquired by Torex who were then acquired by iSoft who stopped development and discontinued the system after a period of inactivity.

By 1989, it had 1000 practices and the company had grown from eight to 250 people [1] .

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Thanks @mike.bainbridge

I’ve made you a member of @wiki-editors which should confer on you the ability to edit wiki topics. (refresh the page to get this)

Please do integrate this great trove of additional information into the wiki article at the top.

If you can use some formatting to structure the post in sections that would be great (eg business, technical, people…)

Reference anything you can, and also have a quick read of the Style Guide

I’ll add this article to the sidebar index, perhaps under a ‘GP IT History’ section

Once you’ve done your changes, you could nominate someone else to either:

  • further improve this article with more details, or
  • start a new article on something like Torex Synergy, or Microtest, or some other forgotten system!
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Wilco.. Agree on the GP IT History section too - there is a lot of it…Some is good and much to serve as a warning to others !

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Intend to completely redo SNOMED CT safety ‘wiki’ - to break it down. That was mainly an exercise in getting used to MD and other things. Just need to allocate the time. Let me do that first. Then will ask others to take a look

Look forward to seeing your contributions Mike