HANDI Regional Workshop Programme 2013/14

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Ewan Davis

HANDI are planning a series of regional workshop to be run by our growing network of regional clusters during the year commencing  April 2013.

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

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Healthcare Apps – Maximising the Impact

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Ewan Davis

Spoke at a great event today organised by Merseyside & Cheshire HIEC with support from Greater Manchester HIEC: Healthcare Apps – Maximising the Impact

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

View this document on Scribd

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Conversations in the North East of England

Posted on January 31, 2013 by networklou

After three well attended events in the NE, a small group gathered this week to plan how HANDI might work for people in the NE. Our assembly came from primary care, software developers, a local authority, an application lead for a large healthcare Trust and from further education.

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

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Help the NHS Alliance and NHS Commission Board discover the most innovative IT

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Ewan Davis

HANDI has been asked by Dr Brian Fisher who is the Patient and Public Involvement Lead for the NHS Alliance if you can help to answer some questions on behalf of Bob Gann at the NHS Commissioning Board he wants to find out about as many as possible of the IT innovations that are lurking out there, smouldering on a computer and hopefully also being used. Bob knows about the large websites and those developed by the NHS itself. He wants the cutting edge stuff particularly from micro-enterprises and gifted amateur developers and is also interested in finding out what people are doing to counter digital exclusion.

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

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HANDI Internships

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Ewan Davis

HANDI wants to offer some ethical internship in 2013 and are looking for sponsors. We need dedicated resource to grow our network and develop our activities and want to do our bit to help talented young people get a foothold in the growing health and care app sector.

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.

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Health and Care Developer Network

Posted on January 9, 2013 by robdyke

HANDIHealth has been working with the NHS CB on something called ‘Health and Care Developer Network’. Mike Kelly emailed over an introduction/invitation to potential contributors this afternoon so I’m posting it here for comments from the HANDI community. Please comment on this blog or in the HANDI forum or email Mike directly (email below).

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“.

Continue reading →

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NHS CB Apps Directory

Posted on January 8, 2013 by robdyke

As you probably are aware, the NHS Commissioning Board is developing an alpha online tools directory that will provide a trusted listing of online health tools for people and care professionals that help improve health and care outcomes as well as enable the growth of an online health developer community.

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

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HANDI Regional Clusters

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Ewan Davis

HANDI now has regional clusters established in:

  • 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 

 

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The HANDI approach to innovation.

Posted on December 11, 2012 by robdyke

Dick Vinegar, the Patient From Hell, wrote about the Westminster Health Forum last month on “accelerating innovation in healthcare” at which I was presenting.

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.

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Health research inspiring software innovation (Sunderland, Nov 2012)

Posted on December 10, 2012 by networklou


A hundred people gathered at the beautiful National Glass Centre in Sunderland in November to hear about the world-class research being done in the North of East of England in fatigue, sleep, movement and pharmacy. Groups of researchers, software developers and clinicians then spent the afternoon either in a workshop about funding and business models for app development, or networking to progress ideas along these themes. The event was kindly supported by the ICT-KTN and slides from the day available soon.

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