Week 38: Cataloguing
So this week started with an impromptu trip to A&E in an ambulance (I’m fine). On the way there mentioned to the paramedic that I work for the NHS, and we chatted about the different digital systems — never miss an opportunity for research.
They were quite happy with the rollout of iPads for viewing and entering information about the patients they saw. But details of vaccinations within summary care records, was mentioned as being unreliable in what was shown, based on upon how the GP had entered it. An opportunity there.
Editing and deleting records
We had some research sessions this week looking at our new designs for how vaccination records can be edited or deleted.
This opens some interesting questions around design patterns and permission levels. Should deleting require more confirmation steps than updating? Should there be a time window in which edits can be made, after which a higher permission level is required?
Edits and deletes should be quite rare, but they’re currently happening more than we expected, for various reasons.
In future, reducing the number of edits could be a good KPI for us, as our redesigns should be helping to reduce the number of errors that need correcting.
Service catalogue
One of the initiatives within digital prevention services has been to try and catalogue all the existing services and provide helpful links with more information about them. The aim being to help our digital teams learn from each other and spot opportunities to join up.
This has been led by Caroline, and was one of the things Vicky was helping with last year too. I’ve been helping where I can.
The digital prevention services list (beta) is currently being tested with internal colleagues across different roles, and we’ve already had lots of good feedback and ideas.
NHS frontend and prototype kit updates
Some nice updates to NHS frontend and the prototype kit this week. A new panel component has been added (thanks Dave!), useful for confirmation screens, and I made a small change to make it easier to pre-select checkboxes and radios.
Big thanks also to Colin Rotherham, who’s joined us recently and has already got stuck with fixing and upgrading a bunch of stuff.
AI playbook
The UK government release an AI playbook this week.
I must admit, so far I’ve not really been that interested in all the recent AI large languagde model stuff. I can’t tell if that’s because I think it’s over-hyped, or because it was invented after I’m 35 and therefore against the natural order of things. Or maybe I’m just too busy.
I did have a brief skim through the playbook though. One of the examples given in the appendix is the NHS User research finder. I’ve had access to this internally and it’s an interesting attempt to tackle a very real problem: finding relevant past user research across different teams.
Unfortunately the AI bit hasn’t solved the issue of how do you persuade teams to log their research in the tool in the first place. A reminder that computers can’t solve human problems.
Arsenal women home derby against Spurs this weekend. Red army!