• ProblemsAndIdeas

see who is coming http://wiki.nhshackday.com/wiki/Who and get on the mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/nhshackday?hl=en

Problems and ideas

• Develop mobile application to allow patients / families to report 'Patient Safety Concerns' - Empower patients & relatives as partners in care and spread this nationally and internationally. Could work as wrapper app or better as relatively simple Android / iOS / Blackberry app. It's like measuring your 'safety temperature' while in hospital. For more info on this idea email Henning on h.clausen@doctors.org.uk or go to: http://www.health.org.uk/areas-of-work/programmes/shine-twelve/related-projects/great-ormond-street-hospital-for-children/

• Patient Journey- User Centred/Core Clinical Process/ Agile Stack - some ideas

• The Checklist Manifesto

• Electronic medical records - records scanned in to a computer so patients can have easy access.
• Electronic referrals from one hospital to another.

• Better guideline accessibility on the go (e.g https://market.android.com/details?id=uk.org.openhealthcare code here: https://github.com/openhealthcare). GoGoGuidelines ftw.

• Conflict of interest in the academic literature, develop an automated measure of conflictedness for particular drug/field e.g thromboprophylaxis

• Switchboard is a bottle neck, directory app that takes and saves hospital telephone number as base and allows extensions to be collected and shared - App idea : switchboard.pdf

• Hospital wiki app with sync and for offline use and version control and security could serve both as a place for useful information and a communication platform for resferral/handover/etc, I want to do asynchronous communication that is transparent to reduce the need for chasing and support professional development and facilitate load balancing. Here is some of the stuff you might need to know in an Emergency Dept. AE_paperwork_helper AE Handbook updated Apr 2010_cleaned.doc

• Get rid of pagers/ bleeps. Read more about the nightmare of pagers here.

• Accessible service directories. It's hard to send patients to the right place if you don't know what services are on offer. Here is a real world example of how one hospital has tried to help with this problem...Royal_Free_Service_Directory_OLD <-- Note that 111/NHS Pathways projects are developing a national Directory of Services. Not sure if integrates with Choices or existing external directories. Must be made available online.

• Unified bug reporting system for the nhs? Focus attention and facilitate transparency to drive improvement, fixmyhospital.com?
• Website/App to show infectious disease epidemiology and outbreak information by location. It would be good to get an app that maps the spread of a new infectious disease within and between CCGs. This could aid planning and distribution of resources/vaccines/antivirals during an epidemic. There are opensource epidemic modelling tools, but they seem to be agent-based and therefore exceedingly processor intensive, or immensely complicated to set up with multiple (and sometimes deprecated) dependencies. The aim would be to use simple SIR models for each CCG based upon a starting state, but with exchange of numbers of infeted persons between CCGs dependent on the 'connectedness'. Connections could be geographic adjacency or connection by major transport routes. The skills needed are: viewer - probably javascript/php, GIS/mapping; data analysis - gopher data from Department of Transport etc and construction of meaningul connections matrix; epidemiology, modelling.

• https://github.com/techbelly/nhs-bth via @beng

• a Visit Me app - for people who don't have a significant other to arrange friends to visit them in hospital when they are not with it enough to set this up - something like setting which slots are free and people booking in... via @lucy_watt <-- Spans health, social, personal care - like Rally Round

• an app that lists what tests are done as part of various 'screens' e.g liver screen, infection screen, confusion screen

• Centralising patients comments and complaints to mine for possible improvements <-- PatientOpnion ?

• Use twitter hashtags/facebook updates to gather realtime feedback from hospital patients
• Use technology so patients can track how long it takes for hospital inpatients to receive,say, an answer to a question from a doctor, or a cup of tea.

• An app to allow patients on the same ward to chat with one another <--Facebook and checkin?

• An geoaware app to allow patients with the same chronic disease in the same neighbour to support one another. <-- PatientsLikeMe ?

• Percutaneous pulse oximetry is one of the most common investigations under taken on patients while they are in hospital. It is probably so common people have forgotten it is an investigation. It involves placing a clothes peg like instrument on the finger, toe or ear lobe which shines a light through the finger/toe/ear lobe to a sensor on the other side which measures oxygen saturation of haemoglobin and heart rate. Could such a device be hacked to be wireless? And if it could, could it report that to the computers on the ward? Seeing in real time the oxygen saturations and pulse rates on all patients of a ward would be very useful, especially if there was functionality which allowed for graphing trends over time via @jonjhilton <---bluetooth enabled pulse oximeters are available already. This gives short field range that could be picked up and processed by a nearby system but may not reach far enough for full ward monitoring unless forwarded. <-- eBay or WIISARD? <--- why not taking it to the next level and see if we can hack a mobile app which does that for android and iPhone/iPad devices? There are apps which use this principle (flash light/camera lens) to establish an heart rate, can the same hardware be used to get an oxygen saturation reading? (There are limits of course, don't know if a camera lens would be the right type of sensor and a flash led the right type of emitter...)

• A web portal to enable patients to request online access to their GP records. This will track responses. It will also present a graphical map of the country showing areas where online access is already available. This will also allow GPs to record their concerns about offering access. Inspired by mysociety.org @wai2k. <--Maybe use Crowdmap to crowdsource patient access? 70% of country have this ability now.

• a web portal to enable surgeons to ask patients to complete pre-operative assessment questionnaires online in the comfort of their own home, to save time, paper and admin.online Pre-op assessment: raised by a Consultant Aneasthatist

• GPs continually struggle with providing enough appointments for their patients but I don't think most practices make use of appointment data that their systems have. This could be used to help evaluate historic appointment usage, and plan for future demand and eventually could provide realtime data on how the practice's appointment system is holding up to demand. I don't think most practices make any use of such real time data or have a true understanding of their appointment usage. I have started to develop something like this for my own practice (I am a GP) but it could be made much better!

• The 'Patient List Problem'. A solution to the perennial nightmare of keeping track of patients, what's wrong with them, what needs to be done. Details: http://bit.ly/HQH0bM @wai2k

• A patient information system to create mobile compatible patient information from PDFs or manual editing which can be served to apps via a webservice. The system will contain tools to help automate the patient information governance task by sending out reminder emails when copy needs to be reviewed. @colinwren

• Any app or service which as a by-product would create a patient led demand for healthcare professionals to use the patient's unique identifier NHS Number - (NHS number is an essential ingredient for reliably joining up the currently distributed record fragments)

• A web portal used for managing patient workflow, using multiple patients going though one or more of many user definable pathways. eg radiotherapy (intention to treat, imaging, outling, planning, prescribing, verification, plan checking, dose checking). It would be aware of the resource implications of each step and the temporal nature of resource availability. It would provide prioritised task lists for individuals/resources, analysis of historic resource implications of tasks, predictions of future resource shortages / patient appointments likely to delayed / targets likely to be breached.
• SELF-CONTROL/BEHAVIOUR CHANGE APP: "exercise more, smoke less, eat more greens, eat less fat" : Obesity and other self-controllable behaviours costs the NHS in excess of 6 billion per year. Let's make a phone app to support positive behaviour change recommended by doctors and collect data on these behaviours. Functionality based on cognitive theory. Give people who want to change the tools to do so.

• REPEAT PRESCRIBING and/or REPEAT DISPENSING APP. Allow patient to interrogate current repeat drugs held on GP system, and then report their needs in an e-request for repeat prescription/dispensing - e.g. 3 months Statins, 1* 28 packs 3mg Warfarin - the rest ok. Could link to surgery EPS service http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/eps and allow confirmation of pharmacy nomination and prescription upload - and txt message when prescription is dispensed and ready to collect. Allow GP to ask for review (or pharmacist to suggest review).

• Four industry social media hack (Food, Alcohol, Tobacco, Pharma). Parts of these four industries promote unhealthy living using social media to the personal cost of us all. Can we fight back?

• NHS ePortfolios Lots of folk are unhappy with their ePortfolio. Can we sort it? Possible technical/political/procurement hack

• Rational GP Prescribing Project practice level prescribing data is now available (via NHS IC), what should we do with it?

• ALISSProject The ALISS project aims to improve Access to Local Information to Support Self Management, to provide a new ecosystem which supports the future development of easy submission, novel sense-making and delivery of local support information. Our technology stack includes Python, Django, MongoDB, Solr, Redis and PostgreSQL.

• Simple tool for capturing the level of care needs for patients with Long Term Conditions, based on the DH "decision support tool", and scoring the results to provide an estimated level of need

• Solutions for capturing and sharing end of life care preferences (aligned to the core clinical data items specified in ISB1580) - with a focus on ensuring they are accessible across multiple care settings. <-- How about Patients Know Best

• Open Source remote consultation – scheduling and note taking app: Tools for remote consultations are growing in popularity. It would be useful to place some structure around the use of an Open Source tool for remote consultations by creating a simple tool to schedule appointments (perhaps via email), remind patients when a consultation is due to happen, and to provide a simple note taking tool for clinicians and patients to make notes related to a consultation.
• Simple eConsultation tool that could integrate with an instant messaging tool/library (e.g. Jabber) and save a record of the entire consultation. This would then ideally be incorporated into the clinical record.
• Intranet solution for GP Practices. I've previously dabbled in putting one together in Drupal but that was a few years back when Drupal was moving from version 5 to 6, I struggled with getting workflow implemented. Version 7 should offer much more promise although I haven't played much with it.
• Take forward information gathering tools at last hack day to create user defined guideline app. Ability to take specific part of any guidance (PDF/doc/etc....) and place in single repository which you (or others can utilise). Could create specific hospital or department collections of key guidance sets accessible by web or mobile.

• Using a Raspberry Pi, a cheap laptop LCD and some excellent carpentry skills to create remotely updatable signage for wayfinding @colinwren

• Allow patients to request repeat presriptions using a mobile phone app. Scan barcodes from medication and send to practice by email. Prescription Barcode Scanning

• Geographical information. Use a postcode to give contact details of District Nurse, Social Service or other community based teams. Could also be used for GP practice areas. WhoCovers

• Patient Problems Dashboard, First Screen Most Useful Information ? Etienne Saliez, Intentional Society for Telemedicine, Other issues to be reviewed.

• Manuals for adjusting machines at the hospital are often kept secret/not available easily on line. It'd be good if they were available e.g how to change the settings on a Respironics Philips harmony Bipap Device PhilipsHarmonyBipapQuickRef1.pdf and PhilipsHarmonyBipapQuickRef2.pdf

• OpenGuide, a more general open source guidelines app type thing....

Added a page with all the themes from the NHS Commissioning Board Online Tools Directory Team.