Delivering a user-centred NHS virtual visit service during COVID

NHS Book a virtual visit is a digital service developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to allow hospital staff to schedule calls between patients and loved ones. The Alpha was built in just 48 hours and the service has now been rolled out across a few Trusts, enabling over 7,000 visits to date.

This service was delivered using rapid, user-centred, agile and lean techniques on an open source base, thereby introducing a new and innovative way of working that is totally different to the commercial off the shelf software which most hospitals rely on. Leveraging the NHS digital service manual, the team were able to spin up a functioning service quickly, ensuring we built on top of previous lessons learnt from the community of developers involved in the NHS digital service manual.

The open source code has laid the foundations for further development, with the service now being rolled out in hospital wards across the UK, and NHSX investigating how it can be used in social care.

In this webinar, we will discuss how the service was built, keeping users at the heart of development, how it was rolled out in a local Trust during COVID times, and the benefits of interoperability and collaboration in healthcare to build consistent, usable services that put people first.

Speakers

• Adam Chrimes, Senior Developer at NHS Digital
• Jessica Nichols, Senior Delivery Manager at Made Tech
• Ian Roddis, Deputy CDIO at Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Agenda

• 45 minutes presentation
• 15 minutes Q&A

Read the full transcript of this episode