NHS Choices aims to aggregate

NHS Choices plans to become an aggregator platform for a more integrated system of NHS services, its head of business development has said.

“What we see is NHS Choices becoming less of an encyclopaedic site and more of an integrated path that is part of the NHS journey,” explained Owain Davies at the Tech4Health event in London on Wednesday.

“The NHS journey can go online or offline as appropriate and we can be an aggregator of those things.

“There are already doctor’s surgeries doing video conference appointments and we are adding integration for those areas. We’ve had symptom checkers for ten years and we have done online prescribing. We are not going into this new.”

NHS Choices is the leading provider for information on health services and conditions in the UK, passing one billion page views since its launch in 2007.

To capitalise on the site’s popularity there are plans to expand its remit. The 'Personalised Health and Care Framework 2020' framework for NHS IT envisages the site integrating with NHS 111, the non-emergency care telephone service, to “create a seamless public information service”.

Proposals for how this will be done are due to be published by September.

PHaC 2020 keeps NHS Choices at the forefront of patient access to information by including plans to allow people to view their care records and to use the MyNHS service to view performance details of NHS organisations.

At Wednesday’s event, Davies commented on the prospect of competition from the private sector for NHS Choices.

“We have some advantages that others don’t have in that we have the data from the NHS and we have access to NHS services. But our aim is not to do anything the private sector could do better,” he said.

“The objective is we do things only the NHS can do, and if someone has built it let’s not try and reinvent something that someone has already done well.”