What we do will depend on what our members want and what they help us to do.
Our initial thoughts about what we might do fall into three broad areas:
Creating networking opportunities
- Putting health and care professionals, patients and careers with good ideas in touch with developers and others who can make their ideas a reality.
- Helping people meet business or project partners
- Connecting app developers with the established healthcare IT suppliers to facilitate partnerships and interoperability
- Introducing developers to sources of business support and finance
- Introducing those with health data, knowledge and clinical content to app developers who might want to consume it
- Building links with professional and trade bodies.
Working with government, the NHS and others
To ensure the technical, regulatory and cultural barriers to app development and implementation are removed and an ecosystem to support healthcare apps developed
- That data and functionality in existing health IT systems are opened up to apps (subject always to good information governance practice)
- That test environments including realistic synthesised patient data are able to support experimentation, and the development and testing of apps.
- That a vibrant market is created with a level playing field for new entrants and established players
- That procurement processes are adapted so that they are “friendly” to app suppliers and innovative business models
- That the infrastructural services needed to support a rich healthcare app ecosystem are in place
- That standard development supports and does not inhibit innovation in app development and deployment.
Providing support with the practical issues that face the developers of healthcare apps
- Legal, licensing and intellectual property issues
- Development tools and methods
- User interface and graphic design
- Interoperability, APIs and supporting health informatics standards
- Clinical safety and product liability issues
- Business models, marketing, promotion and public relations
- Research and evaluation
- Information governance (privacy, consent, data sharing, data protection)
- Identifying available open data resources
- Access to test environments and test data
- Distribution
We plan to do this both through creating a virtual community on the Internet but also through a physical presence on the ground with meetings, hack days and conferences and a particularly keen to facilitate physical events around existing centres of innovation with initial plans for London, Warwick and Newcastle followed by clusters in Scotland and Wales.