Mike Bracken is having a significant impact in the UK Public Service IT delivery by introducing a new level of accountability to user needs. His background is in IT services for the Guardian newspaper, and he is bringing a refreshing emphasis on the need to put the users first, develop systems agilely and incrementally, and escape the cycle of large system project with very large corporations that lock in development resources for many years.
Bracken’s philosophy is appealing to us because it engenders our view of Clinical Team Led Design (CTLD) and the importance of rapid and economical adaptation and incremental expansion. It is important to get something working first that satisfies a given objective, and then to enhance it as confidence in the technology and competence in its use is established.
We would hope that we can add to Bracken’s article on the topic by emphasising that clinical systems, more than anything else, need to support the processes of the user, the clinical team, due to the high need for reliability, but concomitantly the need to support continuous process improvement for every local professional community.
We promote the view that for any one clinical discipline, e.g. emergency medicine, while the data collected from one department to another is nearly the same, the process is very different despite them being in the same speciality. This can only occur with a technology that makes it easy and cheap to change the processes and even allow a degree of experimentation with competing ideas.
Hence, our technology has these features:
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Design is achieved by Clinical Team Led Design (CTLD). The design is automatically compiled into a run-time system by our unique software solution. Users are supported in the design process by our expert clinical analysts.
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Designs can be changed in real time.
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Data is shared with other disciplines by native interoperability based on an underlying lingua franca. (That is one thing Bracken did not mention in his article for enabling data to be shared across departments.)
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Data Analytics is in-built (not provided by third-party software) as it is key to quality control and hence process improvement as managed by the senior staff.
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A single software instance runs multiple clinical information systems, avoiding siloing of data and explosion of IT maintenance.
As our technology is driven by user designs, the future users are able to create a design, test it out and change it at will, ensuring that the go-live system meets immediate requirements and expansion can occur at a rate and in the direction they decide is most appropriate for their own setting.
Read Bracken’s original article here: On Strategy: The strategy is delivery. Again.