Health Care

The Children's Hospital at Great Ormond Street

Linear Blue have been working with The Children’s Hospital at Great Ormond Street, for many years, developing a solution that matches their unusual circumstances around providing education of pupils who are in hospital.

We were requested to write a management solution that had the facility to tracks all pupils, to comply with the Local Education Authorities requirements, with the ability to track a record the work an individual pupil has carried out, even if he only attends 1 lesson during the pupils stay in hospital.

The majority of off the shelf products did not facilitate the flexibility that is required by a hospital school. Most schools have pupils in attendance for a year, or at the bare minimum a term. The Great Ormond Street Hospital School, can enrol a pupil, for a single lesson, on a single day, multiple lessons on a day, multiple lessons over multiple days / weeks. It is a rare event where a pupil attends for a whole term and even less likely they would attend for an entire year.

The very nature of the school, is set up to take care of the educational needs of its pupil no matter how long they are in attendance. Unfortunately for the school this means they have to have a management and reporting tool that tracks not only attendance, but subject matter and has a powerful reporting tool that can meet the exacting requirements of the Local Education Authority to facilitate the appropriate funding to the school.

The reporting tool also enables the school to keep the parents of the pupils up to date, with the work the children have been doing along with grades and attendance records.

This system is now available as a product from Linear Blue - Please visit the KeyPupil : Hospital Edition page for more information.

"The Hospital School's long standing relationship with Linear Blue has meant that we have been able to work together to design and develop a highly bespoke database system that meets the specific needs of a busy school within a hospital environment. The impact of the database on teaching and learning and the monitoring of pupil progress was recognised in the School's recent Ofsted inspection"

- John Sosna, Assistant HeadTeacher for ICT and eLearning of the Great Ormond Street Hospital School.

National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society

When the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society (NRAS) needed help in managing their subscriptions and donations which are key to the success of the charity, they approached Linear Blue to help with their internal systems.

The FileMaker database system at NRAS is designed to store and track all forms of contacts that the charity needs to communicate with, whether they be organisations such as hospitals or the media; through to their members, medical staff or benefactors. The system is designed to make the organisation of the many different types of contacts as efficient as possible. Through that, it can also track donations and subscriptions to NRAS publications. From the main system, the users can also then run mail merges through to Microsoft Word for ongoing mail-shots.

In addition to the main database, the system is also directly linked to the NRAS website, allowing online subscriptions to be pulled directly into the main database system in their offices.

The Leading UK Cancer Research Charity

The resource management team at the charity approached Linear Blue to help with a current project that had been started in-house. The internal team had started to write a management solution and needed to extend it into an enterprise-wide solution for a variety of users across multiple levels of the organisation.

Linear Blue helped by analysing the current system and then delivering a development plan to move the project forward. We looked closely at the work that had been started and how we could work with the internal development team in taking their solution to the next level.

Over a period of many months, the Linear Blue development team worked hand-in-hand with the internal staff at their Head Office. Confidentiality is paramount when working with our clients and because of this we cannot go into specific details of the development. However, Linear Blue were key in designing a unique touch screen interface for mobile users and in helping plan and develop the interface structure, making it easier for different types of users to work with their specific data and functionality.