NHS Hack Day is coming to the CCIO and CIO Summer Schools

NHS Hack Day, the leading grass-roots community of digital health disruptors and innovators, is coming to the Summer Schools for the first time in 2017, and you’re invited to take part.

The Summer Schools NHS Hack Day will take place at Federation, the new Co-op Digital team’s HQ, in Manchester the weekend of 15-16 July, immediately following the Summer Schools, 13-14 July.

NHS Hack Days take place over a weekend and involve teams of coders, clinicians, designers and developers collaborating to try and solve problems and frustrations they face in their working lives, by building proof of concept software over two-days.

Jon Hoeksma, editor of Digital Health News, said: “We hope that bringing together current NHS digital leaders with some of today’s brightest digital health disruptors will be a catalyst for creativity.”

Dr Marcus Baw said: “This year NHS Hack Day is celebrating its fifth year and 15th event, and extending its regular ‘3-a-year’ event cycle to run an extra Summer School Hack Day, created with the Digital Health Networks, to bring a completely new dimension to the Summer School.

“This event will follow on immediately from the Summer School, starting with drinks and Hack Day warm up on the Friday night after the Summer School closes.”

David Miller, chief executive, OpenHealthCare.org, said: “These events are great at helping people explore ways to deal with the practical problems that we all face with technology in the health system.

“As part of our partnership with you all in the networks, we want to help draw on your experiences to try and come up with great problems for people to work on over the weekend.”

So as a starting point, we’d like to ask you a quick question: “What are the top 3 most frustrating things about your experience of technology where you work?”

CCIOs, CIOs and nursing and AHP digital leaders are invited to follow-up the collaboration and networking of the Summer Schools by taking part in the weekend NHS Hack Day.

There are multiple ways to get involved: join a team, bring your own colleagues as a team or bring a challenge that you hope others will help you solve and share the solution with others.

Dr Baw said “On the Previous Events section of the NHS Hack Day site you can see the awesome range and high-calibre of projects that have been done at previous Hack Days.”

To help answer questions and get people ready for first Summer Schools NHS Hackday, a dedicated webinar will be run on Wednesday 12 April, 12.30 – 13.20, and you can register here.

On the webinar NHS Hack Day leaders David Miller and Dr Marcus Baw will provide an overview of everything you need to know (but were afraid to ask) about Hack Days, particularly focusing on how to prepare you, your team, and your idea for the Summer Schools NHS Hack Day.