HANDI Health

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. ...

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.” ...

This month I co-founded HANDI, a new not-for-profit venture. - The Healthcare App Network for Development and Innovation with a few others in the healthcare sector. We are a group of clinicians, developers, health informaticians and others who believe that lightweight healthcare apps for patients, carers and health and care professionals provide the key to enabling IT to transform of health and care. We believe that the app paradigm (which enables rapid development and deployment) is applicable on all devices and is not just about mobile. We want to encourage and support app developers. We know from our own experience that creating an app and getting it widely used can be a painful experience and have decided to establish HANDI as a new organisation to provide mutual support for developers of health and care apps and others interested in this area and want to invite you to join us. ...