How our dashboard gives us real-time urgent care data

Hi Dr. Talbot, All,

I am pleased to see that there is a drive towards near-time event reporting, especially in the new world of GP commissioning. The need for accurate and timely information, especially on admission to emergency services, was highlighted by Luke Twelves at the GPCC event lead by Alison Stephens of The Health Consultancy late last year.

These information feed might, in the future, drive real time decision making by patients; a new generation of of location based information services, such as the iPhone app from NHS Local, would be able to display capacity information about an A&E/walk-in centre, leading to a patient selecting for themselves where to present, if at all!

I'm an open source practitioner and I see many benefits to NHS organisations from adopting open source methodologies. Reduce, reuse, recycle : open source reduces development & implementation time, reusing code and experience to recycle and release cash that would otherwise be spent in reinventing wheels.

Open source need not apply to code only. Indeed, the open sharing dynamic can be applied to documentation and experience. I hope that you and your colleagues will consider this and share widely your experience gained and documentation produced with the wider healthcare community.

The ITK efforts from CfH presents further opportunities for dashboards, as does open source. My company, Tactix4, are working on an open source project similar to the www.itdashboard.gov project released by the US Govt for IT spend. By using ITK and open source libraries and presentation mechanisms, like Drupal, interactive dashboard services could be quickly deployed from a variety of data sources.

With best wishes, Rob Rob Dyke