Proud sponsors of UK Health Camp 2017
This Saturday will see the third free Health Camp in the UK, bringing together healthcare professionals, policymakers and service managers with designers, digital specialists and technologists.
The aim of UK Health Camp unconference is to make both health and care services better for everyone involved – patients, carers and health professionals across the board.
The healthcare sector faces unique challenges in the implementation of technology. Procurement frameworks tend to favour larger organisations at the expense of smaller, more innovative companies and the pace of change is slow. This was acknowledged with the publication of the Accelerated Access Review last October which addressed these issues. It called for a more innovative culture in the NHS and a broader remit for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). Meanwhile, public confidence has been shaken by a series of high-profile project failures.
UK Health Camp creates an opportunity to open up discussions between patients, clinicians, activists and digital people so that they can foster innovation in a sensible and human-centric approach.
dxw sponsorship
At dxw, improving innovation in healthcare in the UK is a subject close to our hearts, having worked with The Department of Health, NHS England and on NHS Jobs so we’re thrilled to be sponsoring UK Health Camp this year.
We believe that it is possible for the public sector to become something recognisably better and we’re on a mission to make that happen.
Since 2008, we’ve worked with government departments, local government, housing associations and the NHS to help them make good technology decisions and build better services.
Our work with NHS England
In 2013 when the NHS Commissioning Board became NHS England, they approached us to build a new site for the organisation. They had identified a pressing need to present information to the public, and to fellow health professionals, in an accessible and transparent way.
Working with the NHS England digital team, we developed and launched a new WordPress website to meet their publishing needs. Over time, we have iterated the website based on insight from operating a live service and made a series of improvements.
As NHS England has evolved, so has the website, so it accurately reflects an organisation that is about people; by ensuring both engaging stories (blog posts), and NHS news are easily accessible to both the public and anyone within the NHS.
Improving both the content and search for the site has been of huge benefit to NHS England’s users. It has also made it easier for NHS England to publish reports, measure the performance and engagement of content, and better understand user journeys.
Our work with The Department of Health
We began with an inception workshop to identify the needs of over 2200 staff. We needed to bring about wider organisational change to deliver their intranet, so we worked closely with DH to transfer the skills and capabilities needed to run an agile product team. After working with us, their internal comms team is now running sprints without their digital team. They used it as a model for capability building – a great testament to collaboration ‘done right’.
In the course of moving their corporate information to gov.uk and the rest of their web estate to dxw, the Department of Health has cut their costs from £800k to about £25k – a saving of over 96%.
Our vision is not just to make ‘nicer websites’, but to help public sector teams make better decisions about technology and build better services. By bringing together policy and delivery, and embedding agile principles into teams, we’ve been able to help clients save time and money and ensure they are primarily thinking in terms of user needs.
We’re looking forward to hearing some great pitches and opening up new conversations about innovation in the health sector this weekend – and of course, meeting some great people!
Find out more about how we work and our projects here.