How can directors of informatics support people driven digital? #NYHDFpeople
How can NHS directors of informatics support and enable people driven digital innovation? This is a question Sue Sibbald and I will be speaking to when we present to the Northern, Yorkshire and Humberside Directors of Informatics Forum this Friday. In our work at mHabitat we have found the top five practical barriers to digital innovation that fall within the domain of informatics directors are: Staff equipped with mobile devices Sufficient bandwidth to access the web Public wifi in all health and care settings A permissive approach to social media (not blocking channels such as YouTube) Access to online patient held records and interoperability with third party apps. The other big barrier we have found is the variable confidence of health and care staff to make use of digital tools and the Internet in their day to day front line work and professional development – the above list will provide the right backdrop but culture and confidence is mostly an organisational development issue. Here is our draft presentation which features feedback from #PdDigital15: Sue and I are keen to crowdsource your priorities for directors of informatics in enabling people driven digital. Whether you’re someone who accesses health and care services, a practitioner, or simply someone with an interest in the topic, we’d love to hear your views. Please comment on this blog or tweet us using the hashtag #NYHDIFpeople. We’ll adapt our presentation to incorporate your feedback...
Digital technologies in mental health – opportunities, challenges and unexpected benefits
In a few weeks time I am speaking at the 2nd Summit New Technologies and Mental Health: Future Possibilities in Barcelona. In my presentation I will share opportunities, challenges and unexpected benefits arising from the first year and a half of our mHabitat programme – supporting digital innovation in the sphere of mental health and beyond. People first – technology second The first insight I will share is a simple one – the fundamental importance of putting people first and technology second. It seems obvious that people should be at the heart of any innovation in mental health, but we have learnt that it is often missed. It is too easy for the allure of new technology to outshine more mundane but crucial considerations of understanding what people actually want and need. Why is it so important to put people first? Creating or licensing a digital technology will only add real value if we deeply understand the preferences, motivations and capabilities of the people they are intended for. Fortunately there are established methodologies, such as user centred design and service design for co-designing digital technologies that add value to a user’s journey through a service. In the health service there is the added dimension that digital technologies need to be underpinned by sound theories of behaviour change and/or clinical guidance as well as meeting regulatory requirements. Generating evidence so we know what works and what doesn’t is also an important consideration. Putting people at the centre is the first step to developing digital technologies that will really make a difference to people’s lives. Putting people first means recognising that...
People Drive Digital #PDDigital at NHS Expo 2015
People driven digital emerged out of conversations towards the end of 2014 about wanting to put people firmly at the centre of digital innovation in health and care. These conversations took us to our #PDDigital event in May, followed by the publication of the People Driven Digital White Paper which we launched at King’s Fund Digital Health and Care Congress session in June, and then the inaugural People Driven Digital unAwards in July. We took a breather, did a bit of reflecting, and are now taking our learning to share with others at this year’s Health and Care Innovation Expo on 2 and 3 September 2015, where Mark Brown, Anne Cooper and myself will be running a session at the pop-up university. Our White Paper gives some clues and some challenges as to how a collaborative approach to digital innovation, as promoted in Personalised Care 2020 can be realised. We argue that the potential for people driving digital innovation from the ground up should be recognised, understood and supported at a strategic level. Health and care need to enable this to happen but it should be led by people not by institutions. We believe that it is only by people driving digital innovation that a step change can be achieved and outcomes in health and care transformed. So what next for people driving digital innovation in health and care? If you’d like to contribute to the conversation, please come along to our session, tweet using the hashtag #PDDigital or comment on this blog – the more we have people accessing and working in health and care services involved in...
Small steps – smoothing the way for #mHealth innovation in the NHS
If we’re going to develop digital tools that make a proper difference to people’s lives, then we need fantastic collaboration between app developers, designers, academics, clinicians and people accessing services. This is the magic that will enable great ideas and solutions to emerge. Sound simple? Well we’ve already come unstuck a few times and we’re only at the beginning of our #mHealthHabitat journey – creating an environment in Leeds for mHealth to flourish. It’s increasingly apparent to me that NHS institutions can be daunting bodies to collaborate with for all sorts of different reasons. But we desperately need the creativity and technical know-how of digital specialists, alongside the domain expertise of people who know intimately what it is like to live with a particular diagnosis, and people with clinical knowledge, teaming up together. My aspiration is to make this as easy as possible, and one way to get there is to learn through doing. Once we’ve done it then it will be a little easier the next time. And so on. A big challenge is in understanding all the checks and balances required by the NHS to protect the safety and privacy of people accessing services. It’s a minefield of information governance, regulation and ethics – all undeniably important and all tricky to balance with agile innovation – learning fast and failing quickly. It is possible to get so lost in regulation that innovation becomes a distant dream. Last week I hooked up with MindTech, alongside a group of people bringing diverse expertise, to begin unpicking all the fundamental standards that should be considered when recommending, licencing or developing...about.me
Victoria Betton
victoria betton
director mHabitat | NHS | social media & mental health doctorate | interested in digital inclusion | parma violets fiend | http://codesigndigitalhealth.co.uk
