Week 72: Act like a tech company
Notes in brief from me this week:
- I enjoyed an internal talk from James Plunkett about digital-era healthcare systems. The most interest bit for me was the middle section about ‘market-shaping’, which urged the state to ‘act like a tech company’ and do things like strategic acquisition of companies and open sourcing of key products.
- Ed and I ran another session of our training course teaching people how to use the NHS Prototype kit. It was our biggest one yet, with 15 attendees (and no drop-outs!), and ran pretty smoothly. As ever, it’s very satisfying seeing people thrilled at being able to make things.
- Our monthly community of practice meeting for people in user-centred-design focused on the topic of contributing back to the NHS digital service manual. This is something that’s strongly encouraged by the NHS service standard, but often doesn’t happen. So we ran through the different ways teams can contribute (big and small), and talked about how we can try and overcome some of the barriers to doing so.
- I’ve been continuing some design work looking at how we could enable large pharmacy chains to more easily get reports on how many vaccinations they’ve given across all their pharmacies. Currently this is a bit of a painful one-site-at-a-time process. We’ve got an idea for a short-term improvement, but longer-term we’ll likely need to change our organisation data model.
- Some of our research has indicated that changing the order of our questions could benefit some users, for reasons we hadn’t previously anticipated. It’s not conclusive yet as the research hasn’t wrapped up, but I’ve started some early prototyping of how things could be re-jigged around.
- I enjoyed gettung a demo from Mike of some early prototypes for a new NHS App using native iOS code. The difference is night and day.
- I dipped a small toe in the AI waters, using the NHS’s GitHub copilot trial to write tests for some existing JavaScript. This feels like kind of tedious work that I dont mind outsourcing. It worked, and I did learn a couple of things in the process. The over-confident chatty tone is annoying though.
Links
- From platforms to pilots: What we’re learning about personalised prevention by Irina Pencheva has some reflections on the recent work and strategy shifts within Personalised Prevention Services
- Preventative healthcare: designing for the service loop from Richard Pope is a set of design provocations for preventative healthcare
- A year at Miro from Matt Jones contains reflections on his first year leading AI within Miro.
I’m off to Paris this weekend. We’re taking the kids up the Eiffel Tower, and planning to visit some markets. Fingers crossed it doesn’t rain too much.