At Open Health Care, we believe in User-centered design.

Which means that we focus on meeting the needs of our users, and is why we always work in close collaboration with them. Whether that comes in the form of making sure that our clinical champions are present at every sprint meeting, or working hard to get clinical staff and patients along to NHS Hack Day we work by putting users first, building and testing in small chunks.

Working this way means that generally when we work on a project, we identify clinical champion(s) for that project. These are the kind of people who will use the service we end up building in their day-to-day work. In order to get them as involved as possible, we introduce them to Agile, and we often find ourselves teaching doctors to github. (Yes, that’s a verb now).

The great thing about working in multidisciplinary teams, is that everyone learns new things, all the time. For every medical three letter acronym like say, CAP that gets explained to a developer, there’s an explanation of what API stands for that goes the other way.

But it’s not just terminology that gets shared - often we try to share our tools. We promote online collaborative document editing above email attachments and naming conventions. We encourage users to take up better web browsers. We get them to try out modern team communication tools, and recommend Open Source alternatives to the proprietary default incumbents.

But wait - it gets better

Not only does this help us all understand one another better, which is so vital to delivering high quality digital services, but it also often introduces clinicians to tools that reward power users with advanced functionality. Once you’ve learnt markdown once, typing information into text boxes that will get rendered in a web browser is never quite the same again. You start expecting that the web based clinical digital services you use in your day job let you use markdown there too.

Possibly the best feature we’ve implemented that came about this way is the OPAL Macros from late last year. Directly inspired by Github issue mentions, OPAL Macros let the user define blocks of commonly used text, and then insert them with shortcut Macros - (names preceded by the # symbol).

For instance, for Staph advice, the user enters #st:

… which then expands to the (institutionally defined) standard advice for this case:

This is the kind of user need that only even comes up when users are digitally literate enough to be able to express it - something along the lines of:

As a Doctor
I want to avoid repeatedly typing out standard advice
So that I can spend more time with my patients

The existence of this kind of power-user functionality encourages users to master their tools, by offering them time savings and efficiencies but crucially, doesn’t interfere with the user experience at all if you don’t know it’s there. As Dr Marks, who had originally explained the need on Github said:

Absolutely stunning.
I would say this is one of the most incredible things I have seen on a piece of NHS software ever.

If you’re interested in starting an OPAL project at your institution to take advantage of this kind of feature, or in seeing how we can can help you by providing clinical facing digital services, don’t hesitate to Get in touch!

Photo credits:
Jacopo Romei

Last week saw us excited to launch our new OPAT (Outpatients Parenteral Antimicrobial Therapy) service delivered via the elCID platform at UCLH.

This is the first deployment of the specialist OPAT module for OPAL - our Open Source framework for building transactional digital services. It covers the whole range of an OPAT service - from initial referrals and assessment, through ongoing care, post-treatment follow up and review. All of the workflows capture high quality data at the time of use, and allow analysis and extraction, both for reporting in line with national guidelines, and individual service audits.

As ever, we worked closely with clinical champions, who were deeply involved in the agile development process, weighing in on GitHub, attending sprint meetings, and providing their expertise to our development team. The whole project is released under an Open Source (GPL) license, and was developed in the open.

This was a project we loved delivering, and not just because of the high praise from Dr Jon Lambourne, UCLH’s clinical lead on the project, who said:

The Open Health Care team have been super, the things they can get the OPAL software to do regularly leaves me slack-jawed!

While we like to think that we’re pretty good at executing on the technology side of things, it’s really the collaboration between us and the clinical users, along with our focus on their needs that makes it possible for us to deliver new user-focussed digital services into the world.

Accordingly, we’d particularly like to thank Dr Sarah Logan (Our consultant sponsor), Steve Collins (OPAT Nurse extraordinaire), and Dr Jon Lambourne (Clinical lead on the project) for all their efforts.

If you’re interested in seeing an OPAL project at your institution, or in seing how we can can support running clinical OPAT services, don’t hesitate to Get in touch!

Photo Credits: Lydia

Last weekend saw us return to Cardiff for the 9th NHS Hack Day - once again, with organisation headed up by the life affirming Anne Marie Cunningham.

NHS Hack Days are weekend events that bring together patients, healthcare and technology professionals and other “geeks who love the NHS” under the banner of making NHS IT less bad. It’s always exciting to see people discover how digital products are made by “Not Magic”, not to mention the jaw-dropping that goes on when it gets explained just how bad much of the status quo really is.

Many of the pitches highlighted the need for quickly and easily customisable hospital systems, that allow people to collaborate more easily, and also to generate alerts and notifications, routing information that exists within our institutions to the people who can actually make a difference with it, in time.

As the second day drew to a close, we all gathered together to share what we’d made, and what we’d learnt over the weekend.

We thought that the team who rescued Virtual Microscope - a previously abandonned open source project for viewing, navigating & annotate very high-resolution images deserved huge credit.

Meanwhile the group that took the Oculus Rift and turned it into an eye-test scenario complete with zombies seemed like they had a whole world of fun !

In the end the grand prize went to Medboard - a system for connecting medical students to the classes & opportunities available to them at their respective institutions.

In addition, we were delighted to see our youngest ever attendee to an NHS Hack Day, with Ada Reynolds stealing the record at just 5 weeks old! Although she may have slept through much of this one, we’re all looking forward to her contributions next time !

Next time looks like being London in May 2015 - although the venue & exact date are yet to be confirmed. We’d love it if you joined us though - so do sign up to the mailing list to be kept in the loop !

Photo credits: Paul Clarke

OPAL at UCLH

Early in the year we deployed elCID - our custom built digital service for infection doctors to University College London Hospital.

Despite our early plans for a cautious, staggered rollout, demand from end users to transition to the system meant that we accelerated rapidly, spreading throughout the division of infection at UCLH and racing through the 1000 patient mark within the few months.

Not content to sit on our laurels, we’ve been further developing the platform, with a specialist OPAT (Outpatients Parenteral Antimicrobial Therapy) service developed and launched early 2015, and a walk-in clinic service scheduled for deployment in spring.

OPAL for research

2014 saw the first academic outputs from the OPAL project, with two posters presented at the Federation of Infection Societies conference.

Demonstrating the new capabilities for conducting clinical audits and exploring hypotheses about the patient population treated by UCLH, concluding that:

The electronic prospective data capture benefits of elCID have facilitated organisation
and interrogation of our own clinical practice to greater levels than before, describing
many hitherto uncaptured elements of clinical activity.

Hackdays

2014 saw the NHS Hack Day train roll in to Cardiff, London and Leeds. As ever the events saw us take multidisciplinary groups of Doctors, Technologists & Patients for a weekend of furious hacking, resulting not only in some great new projects, but in hundreds of individual opportunities for people to connect & learn from each other.

Particularly exciting were TB Care Plan - a single page TB guideline project that managed to take the rule of “As simple as it can possibly be” to new heights, and a Renal focussed OPAL implementation for handover and patient management.

The Future

2014 has been a great year for Open Health Care, & We’re excited looking forward to the year to come !

With new product launches, lots of exciting projects in the pipeline, as well as the relentless programme of running events up & down the country, we’ll be busy!

Photo credits: Paul Clarke && Gabriel Pollara