We have secured funding which will allow some of these to deliver free and would like to know what subjects HANDI members would like us include in the programme.

We have three themes in mind but are open to other suggestions. These themes are:

• Business models – Creating sustainable apps for Health and Care – Practical advice for both commercial and social entrepreneurs .
• Ensuring app quality - What are the regulatory obligations and voluntary opportunities to demonstrate app quality? How can developers meet and exceed these to differentiate their products and build market share?
• Playing nicely together - How can I ensure my app plays nicely with others and with the broader health and care IT ecosystem – Interoperability, orchestration and user interface design.

Our expectation that there will be more that one workshop looking in detail at specific issues under one of these themes. Our aim is to provide actionable, practical guidance for teams developing and implementing apps in Health and Care.

Please share any ideas you have as comments below and if you have not registered with us please sign up here so you get details of the events we decide to deliver

Lots of food for thought. Particularly discussion about the quality of many apps (which is not good) and the need for quality assurance with an helpful presentation from MHRA.

Hope to be able to post links to the various presentations but for now here is mine.

And a storify that pulls the tweets from the event together

We asked… What are the problems we come up against in this domain? What are the conversations we need to have to overcome some of them?

Fuelled by orange juice and samosas, with plenty of post-it notes to hand, the group has shaped a number of themes and activities for the next few months:

1. Enabling conversations nationally around big underpinning themes – architecture, social value, trust
2. Building the channels to enable clinicians and managers to articulate their problems and be helped in solving them
3. Raising awareness of the possibilities, the alternatives and the benefits
4. Skills training – what are the standards? what is the legislation?
5. Events, conferences, showcases, exhibitions, speed-dating, networking, GP Time-Out talks, problem-solving meetings, hack days, workshops – building on the first four themes, enabling conversations between people to make good stuff happen.

We travelled the landscape of some big topics in our couple of hours – what is an app? what is a network for? what is the NHS’s job? how can we manage competition and collaboration? who is doing what locally? what are the funding or income opportunities? how will we organise ourselves in the coming months?

The group is going to meet again in a few weeks – please join our conversation.

Louise Wilson
@NetworkLou / #handihealth
louise.wilson@handihealth.org

I have set up a questionnaire for Brian if you involved in an product that fits the bill please take 10 minutes to complete the questionnaire here

Also if you are interested in innovation and have not yet register with HANDI please do so here

We want to offer a number of internships of six months and pay interns at least the minimum wage. We have plenty of interesting projects but need to be able to provide interns with a supportive environment with appropriate facilities, supervision and mentorship.

We are looking for sponsors who can offer one or more of the following:

• Funding – £ 10k to cover a 6 month internship at the minimum wage including on-costs and expenses.
• Office space where you can provide facilities, support and supervision. -HANDI can provide overall management and supervision, but we want some on-site support. We are flexible with regard to location, but HANDI is currently best able to provide support in the London, Newcastle, Leeds and Birmingham areas.
• Mentorship – Help ensure HANDI and the Intern get the most out of the programme.

We have lots of potential projects but are happy to work with sponsors who have project ideas that meet their needs and also align with HANDI’s objectives. Our current projects include projects in the technical, health and care, marketing and business development domains.

We will work with sponsors to define the job descriptions and person specification for the Interns and on the selection process, but expect interns will be graduates with good degrees from a range of disciplines

If you are able to help or want to know more about being a sponsor or mentor or providing office space contact ewan@handihealth.org – PLEASE NOTE: Potential interns should not contact us at this stage as we are not yet in a position to process applications. Please register as a member on the HANDI website if you have not already done so. All members will be notified when applications for Interns open. You can also follow #handihealth on Twitter and monitor our web site www.handihealth.org to ensure you don’t miss our announcement which we hope to make around the end of Q1 2013.

The NHS Commissioning Board under the sponsorship of Tim Kelsey (National Director for Patients and Information), is developing a Health and Care Developer Network (HCDN). This will be a free public facing web site that will provide the authoritative and premier source of information, tools and collaboration opportunities for all software developers wanting to design, build, test and market health and social care applications in the UK.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery .. So HANDI Health is flattered by this initiative to support and stimulate the development of health and social care IT.

We welcome the efforts by the NHS CB and HCDN to bring together a set of “comprehensive, integrated and open developer resources than can be used by corporate, SME and micro developers to accelerate and improve the quality of their software development“.

The HCDN will have six areas:

Library – will bring together relevant existing developer content dispersed across the health and social care estates into a single comprehensive and integrated corpus that can be easily navigated and searched by developers.

Downloads and Data – will provide links to open access health related data sets that are of interest to healthcare developers. It will also provide a shared code library where developers can share open source code for reuse.

Test Centre – will provide health and social care specific advice and guidance around application testing. It will also provide a shared repository of standalone test harnesses that have been developed and contributed by the developer communities.

Learn – will provide articles, tutorials, videos and code samples to help developers use the other resources within HCDN effectively and productively.

Community – will provide a rich mix of social media channels to help engage and support the developer communities. This will include blogs and a wide range of on-line forums aligned to the many topics and interests covered by HCDN.

Market Square – provides a means of creating a market of development ideas and allows developers to both seek and market their skills and services within the developer communities.

HANDIHealth members are invited to contribute resources and content to the HCDN, for example:

• architectural overviews of systems, blogs on technology stacks you use, technical descriptions of any interfaces/plugin mechanisms to your system that would be relevant to others interesting in integration with your system;
• open source code libraries, test harnesses and/or test data that a developer could freely download;
• tutorials and/or learning materials to support a developers in integrating with your system;
• SDKs that developers could freely download and use to help them in developing for your system;

Your contributions to the HCDN will be reposted on site or linked to, with the contributors ensuring ‘free and open’ access – this is a term that used a lot in the invitation. In contributing to the HCDN you or your company will be added to the “hall of fame” contributors list, where all contributors of content to HCDN will be acknowledged.

You can read the full Terms and Conditions in the invitation to contribute which I have published here and also attached as a PDF to this post. Of interest to me is this condition:

• By contributing content you are agreeing to allow free and open access to it.

‘Free and open’ is rather ambiguous, no doubt to allow for the myriad of licenses around software artefacts that companies may release code under. The recent Cabinet Office Open Standards consultation shows how tricky the terms ‘free’ and ‘open’ can be. Rather than rant about opensource (for a change), my feedback to the HCDN will be to ensure that data/content contributions from Dept of Health / Commissioning Board are appropriately licensed under either the ‘Open Government License‘ and that code is published under an appropriate license to encourage the development that Tim Kelsey is pushing for with this initiative.

The NHSCB encourage you to submit your app via an online certification process that we are trialling. You can find the submission form at http://apps.nhs.uk/

They are looking for apps that

• Encourage customers to use good information to make choices about their health and care, compare providers and make lifestyle choices that improve health and well being;
• Give customers the functionality to carry out transactions online, using their own health information, and then to connect to clinicians and care staff; and
• Allow customers to leave feedback about the services they experienced.
• Build upon and uses trusted sources of clinical information such as  information syndicated from NHS Choices or pseudonymised data from the Information Centre

For the specific highlighting, examples include:

 Online care planning to support people with Long Term Conditions. Support those with LTC’s to create online care plans, record their experience of it and share it with those caring for them online.

 Co-ordination of care Providing better coordinated care for the patients by improving communication between healthcare professionals.

 Online primary care tools Providing the ability for patients to be able to transact online with primary care such as online booking of appointments and repeat prescriptions

 Medication barcode scanning Providing the ability for patients to scan the bar-code of their medications to get information on usage.

 Online Child Personal Health Record (Online red book) Support parents to record information about their child, be linked to relevant information and share it with those caring with them online.

 Patient Participation and Feedback Enabling patients to link up with patient like them, share information and their experiences and provide feedback in real-time on services.

 Transparency Ability for patients to be able to compare services e.g. hospital performance ratings, waiting times.

 Wellness for Older People Support older people, and those that care for them by providing tools that help their daily lives.

If you have any further questions please email tools.feedback@nhs.net and we can get back to you. 

I’ve attached the full document as .PDF for you here : Engagement Follow Up Email for App Developers Alpha Site

• London
• Midlands
• North East
• South West
• West Yorkshire

With formation in  progress in:

• Scotland
• North West
• N Ireland

The purpose of the regional clusters is to organise whatever activities members in the regions want to do and to feed in to what HANDI does nationally. We have steering groups established for each of the clusters and these are open to anyone who want to help to join.

We have just added sections in our discussion forum for each of the clusters and the easiest way to get involved is to post your thoughts and idea to the relevant section.

Discussion Forum 

I gave a somewhat contrarian view on ‘innovation’ with a few ideas on escaping the NHS Giant Hairball. My presentation is published on slideshare and previewed below.

Dick writes:

Possibly the most disruptive speaker was Rob Dyke of Handi (Health Apps Network for Development and Innovation), who helps clinicians to write apps. He is scornful about “big IT” in healthcare. First, it doesn’t work very well. It costs billions, and, worst of all, does not talk to other big-IT systems. Handi’s apps, he claimed, are open-source, and consequently do work together.

Thanks for moniker Dick, I’ll get some new business cards printed.

More disruptively, he believes that an “Institute of Innovation” is the ultimate oxymoron, because “you cannot institutionalise innovation”. Instead you have to “be agile, hack things together, funnel ideas, forge solutions, tweet about them, blog about them; fail lots, win some”.

While I must thank Roy Lilley of NHSManagers.net for the ultimate oxymoron line, the message still stands. Of the all the speakers, I at least gave some opportunities for innovative practice and the real networks for innovation in healthcare IT as found in HANDI Health.

In my book, the Handi approach to innovation, although piecemeal and informal, is more likely to change the culture of the NHS than Sir David’s stately institutions for innovation.

HANDI Health has this culture change at heart, Dick. Thanks for the vote of confidence.