FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 02/05/2012 NHS Hack Day – something important is happening!

In one month's time the first ever NHS Hack Day will be happening. Doctors, developers, designers, and other "geeks who love the NHS" will be converging on London for a weekend working together to make "software that promotes health".

Frustrated by the slow pace of improvement in NHS digital health services organizer Dr Carl Reynolds was inspired by the Cabinet Office's recent highly successful hack days(1) and decided to team up with the technology start-up community to make it happen.

Dr Carl Reynolds who is a junior doctor, national clinical fellow, and co-founder of the software company Open Health Care UK(2) said: "There's so much to be done in digital health, no employer can own all of the talent, I hope the NHS Hack Day will show the NHS what can be done with a different business model"

Sir Muir Gray, Sir Liam Donaldson, Sir Bruce Keogh, Mr Peter Lees, Ben Goldacre, Claire Gerada, NHS Right Care, NHS Information Centre, NICE, and the Cabinet Office's Government Digital Service are supporting the event.

Aims of the NHS Hack Day will be:

  1. To have fun, this is an opportunity for bright doctors, developers, and designers to meet and learn from people in other disciplines they wouldn't normally meet
  2. To make software that promotes health, this is the challenge and there are prizes, we'll have to wait and see what people make
  3. To showcase the benefits of open source software, open governance, open data, challenges, and the talent in the SME software development community

Notes:

Software Development Days (also called “Hack days” by software developers) are intense one- or two-day events that bring together a group of developers to build exciting or off-the-wall prototypes. Hack days are examples of how short development sprints from passionate coders can make a difference. They show that digital technologies can be used to fashion tools overnight that can provide easy solutions to fight wicked issues, or pose real, disruptive challenges to the existing ways of working and thinking (1).

Hack days are now standard in technology industry and fast becoming widespread outside of it. Examples of organizations that have recently had hack days include NASA (3), the Guardian newspaper (4) and Mozilla (5).

NHS Hack Day will be on the 26-27th of May @ University of London Union, Malet Street, WC1E 7HY. If you would like a ticket or to make an enquiry please email carl.reynolds@openhealthcare.org.uk

  1. http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2011/11/08/parliament-week-hack-day/

  2. http://www.openhealthcare.org.uk/

  3. http://www.nasa.gov/open/scihack.html

  4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/info/developer-blog/2012/feb/03/guardian-hack-day-2

  5. http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/1st-ever-mdn-hack-day-in-nyc/

ENDS

Press Release 02/05/2012 (last edited 2012-05-07 13:50:44 by CarlReynolds)