NHS Hack Days

I'd heard about this idea a few months ago but only recently came across the website to find out a bit about what it is (www.nhshackday.com). The idea of the NHS Hack Days are for like-minded people who are interested in improving IT services in the NHS to meet to talk about ideas and solutions for common problems encountered in the NHS. The events are for self titled 'geeks who love the NHS'. the NHS suffers a serious problem with it's IT support partly due to the size and complexity of the organisation. The amount of information is immense with every patient having their own set of case notes and letters. Some hospitals seem to have adapted better than others when adopting IT but I've yet to work in a hospital where the whole system works well. In some places there are efficient ways of requesting, ordering tests and viewing results, while in other hospitals there are excellent systems for keeping track of patients in the hospital and admitting patients to hospital wards. One of the problems is that different health trusts have adopted different pieces of software meaning that there is a lot of variability between hospitals. Every new place I work in I have to be inducted into the new IT system which has been adopted for that particular hospital. Surely there has to be a way of agreeing on a single system for all IT services in hospitals in Scotland? 

While this may seem like a distant dream at the moment, in the meantime I believe there are ways that IT can be adopted to create simple solutions to common problems in the hospital wards. For example, one of the things I am trying to look at in the hospital where I work at the moment is a good way of tracking and recording patients admitted to medicine (while on-call). I've found a few simple apps online which have been created, some as a direct result of the NHS hack days which I have mentioned already. an article appeared in the BMJ recently talking about how doctors could learn to become 'coders' who help to develop new apps. One of the apps I've looked at is 'Patient Handover', developed by a group of doctors who wanted a simple electronic way of keeping track of patients admitted 'on the days take'. This simple app allows the user to enter patient identifiable information (name, CHI, DOB, diagnosis, ward) and store it safely pin-protected. Different users who share the app can sync the information at handover to ensure it works properly. I'm going to see if we can run a trial of using the app in the near future, perhaps when I'm next on-call, to see if it helps the process. The only problem is that it only runs on an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch - so first I need to either borrow one, or see if I can convince the powers that be in the hospital that I need £200 to buy one!