info@dspartnership.co.uk

Services

DS Partnership is a software development house in the Glasgow region, specialising in database-driven web and mobile applications primarily in the fields of health and education. Our distinct advantages are in being able to offer top-level experience from a team headed by Professor Thomas Connolly (developer of the world's first cross-platform commercial database system) and a highly skilled, small team that has been developed by Professor Connolly to provide bespoke, best of breed solutions at a very competitive price.

  • Databases: We are internationally recognised in the field of databases. One of the partners developed the first commercial portable relational database system in the world and went on to write the best-selling books Database Systems and Database Solutions. We have carried out database design and development projects across a wide range of sectors.

  • Web and Mobile Development: We have developed a wide range of web and mobile solutions. Some examples of projects the partners have led/worked on are as follows:

    • My Chemo App – A website and dynamic mobile app that allows patients to record their progress during chemotherapy and to communicate with their oncologists during their treatment if they have symptoms they need advice on. The accompanying website allows a clinician/administrator to maintain a list of chemotherapy regimes and accompanying drugs with supporting information that was used by the app to provide the patient with detailed information about their treatment regime/drugs.

    • Dementia Friendly Aberfeldy – An app for people with dementia and families and friends of people living with dementia. It contains details of local places and events that are dementia friendly, allowing reminders to be set for dementia-friendly events. It allows users to store photographs that are meaningful to them, to hear music that id memorable to them and to store contact information. Should users get lost, there is a feature that allows the person to see their location on the map and to notify one or more key contacts that they are lost by sending a text message of their current location.

    • My Chemo Record – Developed for a local charity, this dynamic app allows a user to record their chemotherapy treatment and to get guidance on what to expect during chemotherapy and how to best look after yourself. The app also offers advice on symptoms and when to seek help.

    • Chronic Disease Management – Website that allowed clinicians to support patients with a range of conditions including Diabetes, Stroke, Coronary Heart Disease (CHD), Left Ventricular Systolic Dysfunction (LVSD), Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).

    • Bowel Cancer - Dynamic app for patients with bowel cancer to capture their symptoms during chemotherapy treatment and provide a website with analysis for clinicians.

    • Scottish Clinical Decision Support – We have contributed to the development of the Scottish clinical decision support platform. This consists of a set of quality-assured clinical decision support tools resources for Scotland’s health and social care. It also consists of an extension to the GP IT systems to handle alerts for medication prescribing. In addition, we developed a set of clinical algorithms for a range of patient conditions and medications.

    • COVID-19 – Developed clinical algorithms in GDL (Guidelines Definition Language) for NEWS2 (National Early Warning Score version 2) and RESTORE2 (Recognise Early Soft Signs, Take Observations, Respond, Escalate)

    • COVID-19: Developed a web-based solution for football clubs to monitor their players and staff for COVID-19, automatically generating electronic submissions to the football association.

    • Myeloma App: Developed Android and iOS apps for a UK charity that allowed users to record their patient journey through their treatment for myeloma.

    • Artificial Intelligence – Produced a report for Scottish Government on the use of Artificial Intelligence in health and social care with recommendations for future priorities.

    • SAFER Maternity Risk Assessment CDS: Our team developed a CDS system for maternity risk assessment/maternity care planning for NHS Educational Scotland/NHS Borders, which develops maternity care plan based on a complex set of algorithms developed by NHS Borders based on NICE and RCOG guidelines.

    • Palliative Care Guidelines/Cancer Referral: Our team have acted as a specialist advisor to the guidelines steering group since January 2014. We have worked with palliative care specialists, the Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care and NHS NES to digitise national palliative care guidelines, make them available on an adaptive website and a subset available as dynamic mobile apps. This led to a wider project with the Scottish Government Cancer Care guidelines steering group and wider NHS eHealth programmes and a strategic partnership with NHS NSS SHOW team.

    • Unscheduled Care/Self-Help Guide: Patient-facing application/app intended to reduce the pressure on unscheduled care (A&E) by allowing patients to self-diagnose and identify whether their symptoms require immediate attention or otherwise.

    • Anticipatory Care Planning (for Health Improvement Scotland): A mobile app for people with multiple long-term health conditions to plan and communicate their needs to their HCPs. The app is multi-lingual with an alerts system for medication and clinical appointments; with advice and support for managing long-term conditions. This is due for launch January 2017.

    • Community Eye Care: Dynamic mobile app and website providing guidance for independently prescribing optometrists.

    • Prostate Cancer App: Developed Android and iOS apps for a UK charity that allowed users to record their patient journey through their treatment for prostate cancer.

    • Scottish Government Competency Framework: We have developed a web-based competency framework for all public sector procurement staff.

    • Online Learning: We have developed a range of online learning platforms for various sectors including education, medicine, technology, engineering and construction both nationally and internationally. We have coordinated and partnered in a large number of EU projects in online learning under ERASMUS, ERASMUS+ and FP7.

  • IT Project Management/IT Consultancy: We have significant experience of IT project management and IT consultancy and over the past 15 years we have managed over 650 project.

Approach

Our project method employs an Agile development approach known as Scrum.


Scrum is an incremental and iterative process that will provide stakeholders with:

  • Flexibility, e.g. to re-prioritize or adjust requirements if required.
  • Regular feedback in the form of tangible deliverables, e.g. functionality can be tested without all other requirements having to be developed/tested.
  • Transparency in terms of project progress and quality of work, e.g. all project activity will be available online for all project members to examine and test.
  • Holistic approach that aims to bring all team members together with a shared/common goal that recognises the end deliverables from a users’ perspective.
  • Clear roles with respect to all team members and any other stakeholders to ensure effective communication.

The following provides an outline of our approach to Agile/Scrum delivery method:

The principles underpinning our approach to effective engagement are summarised as:

  • Shared/Common goal: the entire team understand and recognise shared aims and goals within the project.
  • Social organisation: the team develops and actively negotiates functional norms, roles, and relationships
  • Interdependence between team members: the project and the team members succeed only if all succeed, i.e. technical success is interwoven with design success.
  • Productive involvement: all project team members are supported to contribute appropriately to the workload; resources and skills are identified early on and used effectively.
  • Effective communication: face-to-face and other modes of communication help to monitor group processes and dynamics, drive creativity and enable productive work practices.
  • Collective consciousness: members perceive themselves as belonging to the project team even when the team is not physically together.
  • Cohesion: project team processes function smoothly without need for intervention, members are able to contribute to produce something greater than the individual parts, individual contributions are brought together seamlessly and within nominated deadlines, and members feel they have learnt something from the process and from the other group members.
Stakeholder Engagement

The partnership is extremely experienced at stakeholder engagement and requirements analysis. We generally adopt five key principles to guide stakeholder engagement activities. The principles set the standards to which we aspire in building consistent, open and respectful working relationships. The principles have been tested against and are consistent with current stakeholder engagement standards and practices across the public and private sectors, locally and internationally.

Purposeful

We begin every engagement with a clear understanding of what we want to achieve.

    • While our engagement will be driven by our strategic priorities, we must be aware of our stakeholders’ objectives, environment, expertise and level of influence.
    • When we know why we need to engage and we agree on what success looks like, it is easier to conduct focused and meaningful engagement.
    • By planning our communication and managing expectations, we aim to build lasting goodwill with stakeholders participating in the process and develop an understanding about their capacity to engage.

Inclusive

We identify relevant stakeholders and make it easy for them to engage.

    • We identify and enable the participation of those people and organisations who contribute to, influence, or are affected by our work. This includes those that may be harder to reach for reasons such as language, culture, age or mobility.
    • We provide our stakeholders with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way

Timely

We are open and honest in our engagement and set clear expectations.

    • We will provide information so that stakeholders can participate in a meaningful way and will foster a culture of sharing ideas.
    • We will clearly identify and explain the engagement process, the role of stakeholders in the engagement process, and communicate how their input will inform the project.

Respectful

We acknowledge and respect the expertise, perspective, and needs of stakeholders.

    • We understand that engagement is a two-way process. We take care to be open to alternative views and to listen as well as speak.
    • We respect our stakeholders’ expertise and appreciate the benefits of mutual learning.
    • We recognise the different communication needs and preferences of stakeholders and endeavour to meet these wherever possible.

Process for Engagement

Our five-step process is structured to support thorough planning, preparation, action and evaluation of our engagement activity with stakeholders. The process is a dynamic and ongoing cycle, which supports a comprehensive approach to engagement and will, over time, build an evidence-based platform for continuous improvement.

Think

We develop an overall consideration of strategic business objectives, how these relate to stakeholders and specific issues, and how to undertake an initial prioritisation of stakeholders and issues for further analysis.

Plan

Introduce different levels of engagement, and guide the analysis of existing relationships, available resources and organisational constraints. In this step, we learn more about specific stakeholder’s representatives and decide on what kind of relationship to develop with these stakeholders.

Prepare

Address questions of internal and external competencies and capacities to engage, and how to ensure that all parties to an engagement are able to join and take part in it effectively.

Engage

Address and outline different engagement techniques, and – building on the previous steps – design an approach that suits the needs of the specific situation and help reach the objectives.

Evaluate

Follow-up on the outputs of engagement and ensure that the stakeholders feel assured regarding the quality of our efforts.

How this process is applied will be driven by the purpose, level and type of engagement undertaken. It is also important to note that the process will operate at the strategic and operational ends of stakeholder engagement activities and we may be working on more than one step in the process at any time, with different stakeholders, depending on the nature of the engagement.

Books

We have written a number of internationally recognised books.

Database Systems

book front

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Description

Now in it’s 6th edition, this book has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and has been translated into French, Spanish, Greek, German, Romanian, Chinese, Russian, Polish, Ukranian

This book is ideal for a one- or two-term course in database management or database design in an undergraduate or graduate level course. With its comprehensive coverage, this book can also be used as a reference for IT professionals.

This best-selling text introduces the theory behind databases in a concise yet comprehensive manner, providing database design methodology that can be used by both technical and non-technical readers. The methodology for relational Database Management Systems is presented in simple, step-by-step instructions in conjunction with a realistic worked example using three explicit phases—conceptual, logical, and physical database design.

Database Solutions

book front

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Description

Intended for IT professionals, this book provides an essential information about modern database systems and a detailed, easy-to-understand methodology for database design.

Includes hints and tips for success ith comprehensive guidance on avoiding pitfalls and traps.

Includes two full-length coded example databases, plus 15 sample data models to your needs chosen from 7 common business areas.

Diverse Perspectives of State-of-the-Art Approaches to the Utilization of Data-Driven Clinical Decision Support Systems

book front

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Description

The medical domain is home to many critical challenges that stand to be overcome with the use of data-driven clinical decision support systems (CDSS), and there is a growing set of examples of automated diagnosis, prognosis, drug design, and testing. However, the current state of AI in medicine has been summarized as “high on promise and relatively low on data and proof.” If such problems can be addressed, a data-driven approach will be very important to the future of CDSSs as it simplifies the knowledge acquisition and maintenance process, a process that is time-consuming and requires considerable human effort.

Diverse Perspectives and State-of-the-Art Approaches to the Utilization of Data-Driven Clinical Decision Support Systems critically reflects on the challenges that data-driven CDSSs must address to become mainstream healthcare systems rather than a small set of exemplars of what might be possible. It further identifies evidence-based, successful data-driven CDSSs. Covering topics such as automated planning, diagnostic systems, and explainable artificial intelligence, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for medical professionals, healthcare administrators, IT managers, pharmacists, students and faculty of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

About

Technology Innovators

The DS Partnership are innovators in the IT field, established the Scottish Centre for Enabling Technologies in 2008 to support the use of emerging technologies in Scottish companies in the public and private sectors and have undertaken more than 650 consultancy projects in the past dozen years.

Leaders in Database Development

The DS Partnership are internationally recognised in databases, having developed the first commercial relational database system in the world.

Experienced Software Developers

The DS Partnership are highly experienced in software development, particularly web and mobile development

Experienced in Stakeholder Engagement

The DS Partnership are highly experienced in stakeholder engagement and believe in working closely with our clients to ensure we deliver the product that is right for them

Contact

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