NHS ‘geeks’ gather in Cardiff

The first Welsh NHS Hack Day will see more than 100 “geeks who love the NHS” come together this weekend in Cardiff.

NHS Hack Days have been run throughout England, but this is the first time clincians, developers, patients and designers are gathering in Wales to work on projects to improve the NHS.

The youngest attendee will be 16 year-old Neena Dugar, who has created an app to automate recording of early warning scores called “Clews”, short for “clever early warning score”, which she wants to develop further.

Her father, Mr Jayant Dugar, said she had created the app with little help from him during the holidays.

“She did this all over the Christmas holidays. We’re seeing if we can open source it and develop it further at the NHS Hack Day,” he said.

The hack day in Cardiff is organised by GP and university lecturer Dr Anne Marie Cunningham and Professor James Morgan, an ophthalmologist, along with Open Health Care UK -a digital health services company.

Over the course of the weekend, the attendees will get together in groups to work on projects which will then be presented to a large judging panel on Sunday afternoon.

The judges include Geraint Lewis, chief data officer at NHS England, Emma Doyle, NHS England’s head of open data and transparency and ten other judges, including a patient.

It’s a smorgasbord of judges with six men and six women to even out the gender balance,” said Dr Cunningham.

The weekend is supported by the National Wales Informatics Service, Public Health Wales and the Wales Audit Office.

Dr Cunningham added that having attended two previous hack days in England, she is very excited to be running a Welsh one and doing clever things with technology.

“The pace of work is so intense and involving that the solutions are genuinely co-produced with those who live and work in the systems,” she said.