Hacking for a better health service at the NHS Scotland Hackday
Earlier in March, after using Mydex’s platform to build a fun hack at Midata hackathon last November, I joined the company to work on improving the developer experience of working with personal data stores.
One part of this involves speaking to a lot of developers, to see how people are trying to use the tools you share with them. And this this invariably means going to a lot of hackdays.
Earlier in March, a few of us at Mydex went to NHS Hack Scotland, the first ever NHS hackday run in Scotland, joining more than 70 dedicated developers, designers and NHS workers in spending a weekend frantically working to build new, open source software solutions to improve healthcare inside the NHS. Read on to find out what goes on at an NHS hackday, and what comes out the other side.
What a hackday is like
If you haven’t been to a hackday before, the general format tends along the following lines:
- find a set of problems you want to solve
- find people who can explain these problems to people outside their industry well
- add designers, developers, and other people who work on the web everyday
- give them a compressed timeframe to build something to solve these problems
- share the results
By ‘compressed timeframe’, we’re talking hours here, compared to the weeks, months, or even years of some IT projects — all the projects mentioned here are ones that were started on around lunchtime on a Saturday, and finished by lunchtime the following Sunday.
What an NHS hackday is like
The main difference between a normal hackday, and an NHS hackday is that when you work on some hack to present at the end of the weekend, you end up sitting down with the doctors, paramedics, support staff and nurses who work directly with the public daily, and building something with them right there.
What was built
As a result, at the end of the day we ended up with a series of hacks for solving specific problems currently in the NHS. Here’s a round of the notable ones:
TherAPPist — the overall winner
The prize winning hack, run by the was a tool designed by for patients taking part in exposure therapy, to help them track progress in measuring their anxiety levels in stressful situations, and share it back to the doctors conducting the intervention.
Previously this was done on pen and paper, which made doing any analysis or re-presentation time-consuming and awkward, so they created a mobile app specifically for patients to recording these levels, and share them with their therapists.
GP Provision Planner — GP surgery data visualisation
Moving from specifics of tracking stress levels, was the GPD provision planner, working at a far more strategic level, created by Daniel Winterstein, Dr Anand Ramkissoon and Jo Walsh.
They plotted publicly available demographic data for Scotland showing population forecasts and future housing developments, with existing information about the locations of existing NHS surgeries and hospitals, to highlight where new practices will be needed to serve a growing population.
LittleSick — helping paramedics get people to the right care in the field
One project I worked on directly was the curiously titled Little Sick, a hack named after the term used by paramedics when they arrive on-scene after a 999 call, and find people who are unwell, but not so sick they need to be taken to Accident & Emergency straight away.
We built a mobile app and web service that uses existing NHS24 information, and republishes it in a structured way, that means it could be used by paramedics to find other services (Minor Injuries Units, GP surgeries, etc) nearby, based on their GPD location, to reduce the pressure on A&E centres.
We were lucky enough to work with a doctor, a paramedic and a ambulance dispatch controller and team of mobile and back end specialists to build a prototype that’s been developed since the hackday, and the seem is now seeking funding to run a pilot inside the NHS, to use it in the field.
NHS Quick help — helping the public get to the right care themselves
A similar project aimed at a different audience, was NHS Quick help — aimed at directing people toward alternative services to A&E when they’re sick, to make better use of NHS’s resources, by republishing the NHS24 data in a different structure.
Refreshingly for such a technical event, not only did they create a mobile friendly website, they also worked in print too, creating posters designed for those with and without access to screens.
Main takeaways from the event
A few key themes kept surfacing in the hacks presented at the weekend.
Digital isn’t automatically better
While there is a definte technical bias at a hackday like this, digital for digital’s sake isn’t very helpful — there were stories abound from staff about IT systems that created bottlenecks in workflow, or used proprietary formats that could only be used by software from one company.
This is partly why so many hacks presented were built around open source software, and in many cases allowed use by more than one device if they were based around mobile versions.
Lot of scope for reusing data
Three of the hacks mentioned in this blog post resolved around reusing existing raw data published by the NHS through their NHS24 website, and each hack ended up performing many of the same kinds of steps to prepare the data so it could be reused in similar ways, duplicating lots of effort across the event, rather than working on solving the initial problem.
There’s a strong argument for publishing data that is already made available through NHS’s own sites to the public in raw form, and also allowing it to be hosted in enriched form too, to build on the work put in at events like this in future.
Safely sharing and storing personal data is still a challenge
The other key point was that so many apps were either mobile, or used mobile devices to speak to a central server where a patient’s personal data would be stored.
It’s hard to store these records in ways that are both a) safe and b) convenient, but the rewards for doing so include dramatically better healthcare, and greater agency for both patients and people providing care.
Wish you’d gone?
If you’re reading this and wishing you’d been able to make it, you might be interested in the next NHS hackday happening back across the border in London in late May (we’ll be there)
Alternatively, if you’d like to chat to a few of the dedicate NHS types who organise these kinds of events, you could do worse than join the NHS hackday mailing lists for the UK, and one specifically for Scotland.
See you at the next one!
Further links
Full list of projects and source code
