Last weekend saw us reach a milestone as we brought NHS Hack Day back to London in our tenth event in just three years!

NHS Hack Days are weekend events that bring together patients, healthcare and technology professionals and other “geeks who love the NHS” under the banner of making NHS IT less bad. It’s always a pleasure to see so many talented people come together to share their time, skills and experience to create something together, and this was no exception.

The event started with clinical staff, patients, and anyone else who felt they had a way to make the world a little better pitching ideas that they wanted to work on. Pitches start with a User Need - for instance the surgeons who need a way to track their continuing professional development, or the doctor who wants quick and easy offline access to formulary information. The attendees then pick what project they want to work on, and form teams to try and build a prototype over the weekend.

At the end of the weekend, we gathered together to share what we’d learned and what we’d built over the weekend.

Some of the stand-out projects from the weekend were The Locumator - an app which helps hospital schedulers and doctors to fill vacant slots with bank staff, and Take Your Meds - a low-tech phone reminder application that sends a configurable audio message via phone call to a patient, reminding them to use the mouthwash, or take their medication.

You can see the whole list here.

Locumator’s presentation





More information on Take Your Meds is available from their Github account

This time, our cat-herder in chief was the amazing @deckofpandas - and we’d like to thank her again for all of her hard work in making the event such a great experience for everyone involved.

Next time looks like being Manchester in Autumn 2015 - although the venue & exact date are yet to be confirmed. We’d love it if you joined us though - so do sign up to the mailing list to be kept in the loop !