Heart a-hack

A group of clinicians and developers won NHS Hack Day Oxford with an open source electronic patient record for cardiologists.

The weekend event brought together 150 healthcare professionals and software developers to create solutions to problems in the NHS.

The winning project, called OpenHeart, is an extension of OpenEyes, a collaborative open source EPR project led by Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

The winning team explained that when several doctors treat the same patient, problems arise due to duplicate information and illegible paper notes, creating stress for clinicians.

OpenHeart allows doctors to access and log patient data in one place. It includes an illustration tool, so if a patient has a bypass the doctor can easily add a drawing of it, and can also be used for prescriptions and electronic discharge letters.

Bill Aylward, consultant surgeon and project director of OpenEyes – which went live at Moorfields last year – told eHealth Insider that the aim of the open source project was to expand it to other specialties.

“This weekend we have shown we can do it for cardiology. We hope this will mark an important step,” he said.

Fourteen submissions were made to the judging panel, which included author of the ‘Bad Science’ column Dr Ben Goldacre, chief data officer NHS Commissioning Board Dr Geraint Lewis, and associate director of the Health Foundation Elaine Maxwell.

The prize for greatest potential went to ‘Active Letter’, a system which lets hospitals send discharge letters to GPs securely on the N3 network.

Hospital doctors can create a task-list for GPs and incorporate it into their clinical system. This means GPs know what to follow-up on and both patients and hospitals can track what tasks have been completed by the doctor.

Dr Goldacre said he was very impressed with the entries and with what could be achieved over one weekend.

NHS Hack Day organiser Dr Carl Reynolds said the aim of the weekend was to improve patient care through improving NHS IT and he was very happy with the traction it had achieved.

“We’ve got a lot of support and commitment from the NHS to actually get some of these projects off the ground,” he said.

The next NHS Hack Day will be in Cambridge.

Read more about the Oxford Hack Day in Insight.