Tag Archive for: NHS Digital

An easy way to register with a GP surgery

Dr Shanker Vijay, GP and Digital First Lead for London, explains why he is championing the national ‘Register with a GP surgery’ service and talks about improvements to the service.

It should be quick and simple for a patient to register with a GP surgery, but often it isn’t. Having worked in many GP surgeries, I’ve seen both patients and practice staff struggle with the process, leading to a poor experience for all. This can vary from patients being daunted when faced with dated, confusing and lengthy paper registration forms to busy practice staff having to find the time to deal with new registrations amongst all their other tasks.

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Why we’ve put sustainability into the NHS digital design principles

Tero Väänänen, Head of Design in NHS England’s Transformation directorate, explains the new NHS digital design principle focused on sustainability.

The NHS has set an ambitious goal of achieving ‘net zero‘ carbon emissions by 2040 for the emissions we control directly. This is not only for environmental reasons. As the Greener NHS programme clearly states, climate change is a health risk as well as an environmental risk.

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Our API Developer Community is growing

Thasmim Ali, Product Owner of our API Developer Community, talks about how we’ve improved support for teams integrating with our products and services – and outlines our next steps.

The Developer Community  provides an open and transparent forum for members to share knowledge, learn, and collaborate on problems related to API management. We launched the community in alpha phase in November 2022, and we’ve seen membership grow to more than 450 users since then.

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Shaping the future of technology in general practice

Dan Wintercross explains the benefits of getting involved with the early adopter programme, which is giving GP practices the opportunity to shape the future of digital, data and technology in primary care.

We established the early adopter programme to enable primary care networks, GP practices and integrated care systems, to shape new clinical digital systems. It is an opportunity for GP practices to receive funding to work in partnership with suppliers to make sure new systems are developed to meet the needs of primary care settings and their patients.

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What does the future NHS Spine look like?

Shan Rahulan and Mark Burton describe plans to modernise the Spine platform and invite IT professionals to help shape the future.

How do you connect 26,000 healthcare organisations and allow information to safely and securely flow across national and local IT systems in England?  

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Using content types to transform the NHS website

How do you make sure all content is user-centred, accessible, safe and accurate when your product is one of the largest and most used health websites in the world? Mark Robinson, Senior Content Designer, explains our approach.

Things have changed a lot since the NHS website first launched in 2007. The way we consume content has changed considerably, with new technologies like smartphones, apps and smart assistants.

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Helping people think straight about alcohol

David Evans, content designer for the Register with a GP surgery service, says it’s difficult to get accurate answers about people’s smoking and alcohol consumption – and explains what the team is doing to improve the way people assess their intake.

The Register with a GP surgery service asks patients a variety of questions about themselves as part of the standard registration process, giving practice staff valuable health information from day 1. To enable better care, users are asked lifestyle questions, including those relating to their alcohol intake and smoking habits.

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A new way to find patients

Darren Hickling describes NHS Digital’s role in developing a platform to identify the highest risk COVID-19 patients so they could receive life-saving antiviral treatments.  

As COVID-19 emerged and treatment options were limited, pharmaceutical companies began researching and developing new antibody and antiviral treatments to reduce viral replication or alleviate symptoms in immunocompromised people. 

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How to jump into the cloud

Neil Gibbs, Cloud Engagement Lead at NHS Digital, says we need more NHS organisations to migrate to the cloud and explains what help is available.

The benefits of migrating services from on-premise data centres to the cloud are clear. Cloud hosting is cost-effective, allows for greater speed, agility and scalability of services, improves security and creates more opportunities to adopt innovative solutions.

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What we have learned about retiring APIs

Business analyst Matthew Firth gives an update on what NHS Digital has been doing to progress the API ‘sunsetting’ strategy to retire some of our APIs over the last year. 

Last year we published our blog ‘What happens when we ‘sunset’ our APIs?’ in which Munish Jokhani explained how we actively deprecate (where we advise of our intention to retire the API while retaining all existing service levels) and retire our APIs, and the effect this had on developers. By working with our suppliers and engaging them early in the process, we found that we were able to agree and align the retirement dates so that we met our suppliers’ requirements. 

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