Posted - 23 July 2019, Rohan Gunatillake, Head of Product
The role of good service design in healthcare technology
One of the things that really made me want to join NDS was that it had a mandate to use the Scottish Approach to Service Design, as outlined in the Digital Health & Care Strategy of 2018. Led by the Scottish Government, the progressive and – to my mind – essential vision of the Approach is that …
Read Post
Posted - 24 June 2019, Dr Catherine Calderwood, Chief Medical Officer
A New Platform for Realistic Medicine
A few years ago, I read an interesting and thought-provoking editorial in a medical journal with the engaging title of ‘You, Me and the Computer Makes Three: Navigating the Doctor-Patient Relationship in the Age of Electronic Health Records’. The author reflects on the increasing influence of techno…
Read Post
Posted - 03 June 2019, Rohan Gunatillake, Head of Product
How can product management transform health and social care in Scotland
Not only is what we are making here at NDS different to how health and social care technology has been imagined and built in the past, how we are making it is different as well. That means that many of the roles that people have or that we are hiring for are relatively new to the contexts of NHS Sc…
Read Post
Posted - 20 May 2019,
Welcome to Dr Sam Patel, Clinical Lead – NDS
My name is Dr Sam Patel and I am a consultant physician in respiratory and general medicine working in NHS Lanarkshire. I recently joined NDS as one of the team’s Clinical Leads – this blog highlights my reasons for joining the team, as well as my hopes for the National Digital Platform. Dr Steve…
Read Post
Posted - 10 May 2019, Rohan Gunatillake, Head of Product
Moonshots, kind technology and transforming healthcare
During a recent talk at a digital health and care conference in Glasgow, NDS’s Director (and my new boss) Geoff Huggins asked the room what should be our moonshot? What should be the big, ambitious — even outrageous — goal that we as a team and a community take on as the totem of transforming health…
Read Post
Posted - 06 May 2019, Paul Miller, Clinical Lead, NES Digital Service
A little bit of ReSPECT
In my last blog I promised I would start to provide a guide to openEHR for health and social care practitioners. This to encourage people to become involved in helping to define and agree the content models that we will use on the National Digital Platform. These models are very important as they wi…
Read Post
Posted - 18 April 2019, Dr Alistair Hann, Chief Technology Officer
What is the National Digital Platform made of?
I don’t seem to last long before hearing about how some company or organisation is building a ‘platform’, but what do they mean by that term? From the analogy, we might guess that a ‘platform’ is something you can put other things on top of, so that they are elevated to a better place. In the case o…
Read Post
Posted - 28 March 2019, Steve Baguley, Clinical Lead - NES Digital Service
The National Digital Platform as a source of truth
Dr Steve Baguley is a consultant Sexual Health & HIV Physician and Clinical Director of eHealth for NHS Grampian. He recently became one of the Clinical Leads for NES Digital Service (NDS). In our latest blog, he writes about his motivation for taking on the role. Inverurie station can be a …
Read Post
Posted - 07 March 2019, Paul Miller, Clinical Lead, NES Digital Service
Welcome to Paul Miller – one of our new Clinical Leads for NES Digital Service (NDS)
In our latest blog, Paul Miller talks about joining the team as one of the Clinical Leads for NDS. Joining NDS! In February, I started in my new role as one of the Clinical Leads for NDS. It’s great to get started as there is a lot to be getting on with! One of the first things I wanted to do was …
Read Post
Posted - 14 February 2019, Dr Alistair Hann, Chief Technology Officer
The Road to the National Digital Platform
Building a National Digital Platform for health and social care data is a huge undertaking, and in a recent blogpost, NES Chairman David Garbutt asked “where do we start – which route should we take through the landscape of systems?” We have now started building the platform to make health informati…
Read Post
Posted - 07 January 2019, Pamela Dimberline, Specialist Lead, NES
Helping staff get the most out of tech
On these pages, we’re hearing a lot about how tech can help improve people’s lives. But it’s vital that the health and social care workforce have the knowledge and skills to exploit the opportunities that exist now and in the pipeline. Scotland’s Digital Health and Care Strategy emphasises workforc…
Read Post
Posted - 26 November 2018, Geoff Huggins, NDS Director
A week in NDS
Geoff Huggins gives us an insight into a typical week as NDS Director, working with stakeholders to plan the National Digital Platform: Monday 19 November –It’s essential that the National Digital Platform fits in with other ongoing and upcoming IT developments. So this week kicked off with a morni…
Read Post
Posted - 11 October 2018, Dr Alistair Hann, Chief Technology Officer
Why do some features flop?
I often hear businesses talk about investing a lot of effort in trying to achieve an outcome that is important to them, but with little success – I then draw a simple diagram that explains exactly why and offers a better way forward. I hope you find it useful too. Consider a hypothetical online sho…
Read Post
Posted - 09 October 2018, David Garbutt, Chair, NHS Education for Scotland
Would you start from here?
I met a delegation from Estonia recently, who were discussing how they’d managed to build an fantastic integrated, set of healthcare IT systems. While they undoubtedly had vision, drive and technical insight, a key factor was that they’d started from a clean slate. After the break-up of the Soviet U…
Read Post
Posted - 28 August 2018, Dr Alistair Hann, Chief Technology Officer
Washing up as you go along
In 1992, Ward Cunningham came up with ‘technical debt’ as a metaphor for the consequences of choosing to ship imperfect code: "Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite... The danger occurs when the debt is …
Read Post
Posted - 15 August 2018, Dr Alistair Hann, Chief Technology Officer
Why I don’t like ‘digital’.
I recently joined the NES Digital Service, and even suggested the name, so it may seem strange that whenever I hear the word ‘digital’ I get twitchy and a cheeky voice in my head says ‘analogue’. That concern is about why something needs to be called ‘digital’. I have never heard my thirteen-year-o…
Read Post
Posted - 03 August 2018, Geoff Huggins, NDS Director
Digital platforms: what’s in it for citizens?
In a previous post we outlined some of the problems facing clinical and other staff in delivering health and care services, and outlined how a national digital platform might start to help. But as citizens, how’s this going to benefit us directly? Health and care services are intended to help peopl…
Read Post
Posted - 26 July 2018, Geoff Huggins, NDS Director
What’s this NES Digital Service thing about then?
A few weeks ago I began to work with some people to develop a new ‘national digital platform’ for the health and care sector. We want to take a fresh approach, both about what we’re doing and how we go about it. So, as people keep asking me: “What are you up to Geoff?” Well, it’s about technology,…
Read Post
Posted - 26 July 2018, Jamie Reid, Product Owner
Turas FNP - coming soon…
The collection and interpretation of data is one of the aspects of the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) programme that makes it so unique. The current data system which uses a platform reaching the end of its useful life and which was not developed with the specific needs of FNP in mind. NES Digital…
Read Post
Posted - 20 July 2018, Geoff Huggins, NDS Director
Welcome to the NDS
We are a new team, working to improve how your medical information is managed so that it is available to you, when you need it, safely and securely. We think you should be able to do things like book appointments, get test results, manage your medication and renew prescriptions. To make this happen…
Read Post