2015 was a big year for us - so we thought we’d take a moment and share some of what we’ve been up to:

Delivering Digital Services for direct care

We believe that the digital tools used to deliver patient care should be of the highest possible quality. Not only do we believe it, we work hard to deliver them as well!

Last year we launched two new services - for managing OPAT care at UCLH (patients who need regular IV drugs but aren’t so sick that they need to stay in hospital all the time), and for the returning traveller walk in clinic at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases.

We’ve also been working to iteratively improve the services we run - conducting user research interviews, observing clinicians using our tools on the wards, and generally trying to establish robust feedback loops and processes for users to tell us how we can make things better for them.

From the wards yesterday: "You're actually coming and asking doctors how you can make the IT systems they use better? - That's unheard of"

— David Miller (@thatdavidmiller) September 11, 2015

Based on this research, we’ve made lots of improvements to the UI of our services, coming up with new design patterns for building applications for direct care in the process.

Code

Lots of this work invovles us writing, maintaining and improving code.

During 2014 We made 3 major new releases of OPAL - our framework for building digital services for clnicians, not to mention many other smaller releases, making up 2,416 individual commits across all our Open Source projects.

Throughout the year we’ve been focussing on making our projects easier for new developers to pick up - improving the documentation and refactoring things to provide better APIs for people to build on.

Hackdays

2015 was as busy as ever for NHS Hack Day, with three events bringing together hundreds of clinicians, academics, designers, developers, and patients to help make the NHS just a little better.

We kicked off the year with another trip to Cardiff, before coming back to London in May, and then heading up to Manchester in the Autumn.

UK Health Camp

2015 also saw the first UK Health Camp - a community unconference for people interested in digital and data in health and care. We were proud to sponsor the event, and glad to have a community space to discuss the pressing issues of digital transformation within the NHS.

We’re already looking forward to next year, and have started plotting how to make it even more of a success with the rest of the team!

The Future

Looking forward to to this year, we’re excited to be working on lots of new projects, with new partners, as well as continuing to develop and improve our existing services.

If you’ve got a project you think we could help with this year, do drop us a line at hello@openhealthcare.org.uk - we’d love to hear all about it!

Photo credits: Paul Clarke

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