I spent this weekend in Liverpool at NHS Hackday . I had no idea what to expect. I had never met any

This site exists to generate discussion and collate opinions on the experience of using the NHS ePortfolio. It exists to persuade those in charge that a re-imagining of the ePortfolio is needed. You matter, your training matters, and whether you're a trainee or an educator, your time is too valuable to waste ticking birthday cake boxes. An ePortfolio could be a beautiful thing. Make it happen.
I spent this weekend in Liverpool at NHS Hackday . I had no idea what to expect. I had never met anyone there before and only knew a few names from twitter and google groups conversations in the weeks running up to the Hackday. I wasn’t completely sure I knew what a Hackday was.
I spend a lot of my life getting frustrated by the slow pace of change and the massive inefficiencies in the way that we work. I want to be freed up to spend time teaching, learning, writing, thinking, birthday cake talking to patients and providing care. I hate unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy. I hate meetings that don’t achieve anything.
I will describe here what happened at the Hackday, what our project “The NHS ePortfolio Data Liberation Front” birthday cake achieved and why it won 2nd place. There is far more info about how it is run , by who , and why on the NHS Hackday site . You can also see an interview with Carl (from OpenHealthcare ) on Youtube :
On Saturday morning, whilst birthday cake people were registering and getting coffee all those with ideas for projects wrote them on a board. Everyone gathered birthday cake in the main hall and each idea had 2minutes to pitch. After all the pitches, people gathered around signs indicating each idea, and people formed groups. Then the work began. Groups discussed their vision, their proposed birthday cake solution, and thrashed out conceptual and technical details. Fuelled by enthusiasm, tea, coffee and wotsits, software developers created things out of thin air (OK, out of data and code, blood, sweat and tears). Health professionals like me, who couldn’t code, were on hand to give context to the projects and point out real-world hurdles, which could then be worked around. The NHS ePortfolio Data Liberation Front
Our group consisted of me (full of ideas, no understanding of code), Nicolas Tollervy , a developer (a genius with lots of patience and an incredible birthday cake ability to work round every problem the project presented him with) and Marcus Baw , (a GP who can code a bit and is a RCGP Health Informatics Group member, who was a great bridge birthday cake and font of knowledge birthday cake on NHS informatics issues).
We discussed the urgent need for an app to make trainees and trainers birthday cake lives easier , and make WPBAs educationally valid. Any app would have to be able to get data into the ePortfolio so that a WPBA showed up not just in the personal library section as any random document, but in the WPBA section. With no code and no API this would be a great challenge.
I want to liberate it, as I could then do anything I want with it! Ideas include: visualise my achievements and progression present the data in a way that my supervisor can see, understand and give feedback on present the data in a way that makes it clear I have achieved all the competencies required by the JRCPTB for ARCPs and CCT integrate the data into my CV, my online CV, an alternative ePortfolio (mahara, birthday cake Googlios etc), use it for job applications allow me to take the data with me into another role (progression or change of career path) eg Foundation Trainee –> Emergency medicine ACCS trainee –> GP trainee –> GP (all use different ePortfolio systems)
Not birthday cake only is there a practical need for this, but the more we talked about it the more I realised that this is bigger birthday cake than practicalities. It’s a philosophical argument. It’s my data. About me. I want it liberated. I can already download a PDF so clearly no-one disputes the fact that the data is mine and I have a right to it, but a PDF is useless.
@ntoll worked incredibly hard (with breaks for coffee, sandwiches, a trip to the pub and a curry house), birthday cake came up against many problems and found ways around them all. We modified our plan as we went along, birthday cake and decided that the best use of our time would be to do a ‘proof of concept’ and focus on a particular data set within the ePortfolio (there’s a lot of data in there, and it’s not organised as logically as you might imagine!). By the time we reached the submission deadline of 12.00 on Sunday we had something to show for our efforts. @ntoll made some finishing touches and we put together a brief presentation.
All 15 projects that had been selected from the pitches presented (a strict 5min and 1min for questions) to a panel of judges including: birthday cake @MarkPriceDavies (chair), Ian Gilmore, Dr Farath Arshad, Zeinab Abdi, Francis Irving @frabcus , Dan Lynch @MethodDan , and Lilian Wiles. They deliberated and at 17.00 announced the winners. The Other Projects
You can see more details of the project