With the rest of Tactix4 I headed to Liverpool in September for the second NHS Hackday. We worked on a project called AsKiT which came second. It was great to collaborate with others from NHS organisations to create problem solving code. **The Problem: **All throughout the NHS there are a myriad of forms, questionnaires and assessments that need to be done, and the vast majority of them are done on paper, with the results stored in a folder in a cabinet or later scanned in and saved as a pdf file. Neither of these solutions allows ready access to the information in a digital form, and does not provide any of the benefits of digital capture. The Solution: By creating a general-purpose question asking android app we have removed the need for the paper part of the process, now the questions are displayed on the screen and the results are captured digitally. It is no longer possible to write something that is illegible, or answers a numerical question with letters, or forget to answer certain questions. The results are then sent securely to the server where they are stored and can be forwarded directly to the appropriate system for further use. ...

There is a renewed vigor in healthcare IT. Lots of great projects curated by enthusiastic people, encouraging new thinking around the definition, development design and delivery of technology for healthcare. Here I’m thinking about DigiHealthCon, HANDI, NHS Hack Day and the eHealthOpenSource competition and Pipe and Hat Club. I’m involved in three organisations: eHealth OpenSource as Secretary, HANDI as a co-founder and NHS Hack Day as a participant and advocate. When I’m not doing things relating to those three, I’m a Director of Tactix4 Limited, an opensource healthcare IT company. I thought I’d share some of my thinking about these projects and how I see them fitting together. ...

I participated in the first NHS Hackday last month. The weekend event in central London brought together doctors, healthcare leaders and software developers with the aim of creating solutions to problems experienced on a daily basis in the NHS. The winning development, called ‘Patient List’, aimed to improve the handover of patients and replace the traditional task-list methods usually employed by doctors. The Patient List problem is felt by every junior doctor in the NHS, but it was formally raised by Wai Keong Wong in a blog post titled “Give every doctor an extra 30mins/day with patients by solving the ‘Patient List’ problem”. In summary, a system is needed to save junior doctors from error-prone manual daily work compiling lists of patients and their treatments for their daily rounds. Furthermore, the system should include task lists for each patient and a way to manage transfer of tasks between shifts and departments so that nothing gets forgotten during handover. ...

From a thread on the handihealth discussion group. @medicine20 tweeted ‘The reason Silicon Valley hasn’t built a good health app’ The general thrust of the article is that current crop of popular mHealth reflect the needs and desires of particular socio-economic groups: white, suburban, materially secure, educated technologists creating apps that compliment the gym going, lifestyle jogging hipsters. Apps become the technological expressions of the ‘quantified self’ of the developers - “Homogenous teams of innovators make products for people just like them. And that’s a problem.” Perhaps this ‘quantified self’ analysis misses for the point, for not just the old and cynical but for the vast majority of the population : “After all, we build what we know.” ...

A single corporate identity for the NHS was introduced in 1999. This replaced the 600 or so logos within the NHS, all competing with each other for the public’s attention. This competition made it difficult for people to distinguish NHS services and communications from those of commercial companies or charities. The single NHS identity was created to address these issues of identity and to improve recognition and accountability. There are guidelines for print, web and powerpoint presentations; colours and branding for each of the organisation types, from dentists to foundation hospitals....