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December 5, 2005

eGovernment Conference 2005: honourable mention

Many thanks to William Heath for his mention of Patient Opinion in his speech at the recent Ministerial eGovernment Conference 2005.

Speaking about co-creation and how traditional European democratic feedback mechanism are being enhanced by digital media in general - and Web 2.0 techniques in particular - William outlined his vision of an e-Europe which

...needs to evolve on the basis of feedback about what people want and what works.

But he also asks, with good reason:

Are Europe's public-sector institutions open to such feedback? When they hear it, can they - do they even want to - act on it?

In this context, William had this to say about Patient Opinion:

Paul Hodgkin, a GP from Yorkshire, Launched Patient Opinion this month. It collects stories about the National Health Service and gives health managers unvarnished feedback. With RSS the individual responsible gets precisely the relevant feedback for their specific unit.

Health Managers were pretty apprehensive about this - wouldn't you be? - but so far half the replies have used this service to say "thank you".

A quarter do raise problems, but generally in a dispassionate and responsible way. Of course Health Trusts want any criticisms removed, but Patient Opinion, which is supported by the DoH, is brokering process to manage even complaints about a named member of staff.

We have been thinking a lot recently about how NHS organisations can respond and adapt to increasing levels of online engagement by ordinary people, and how they can benefit from the many opportunities afforded by this - all of which is actually informing our plans for further system development and the services we can offer to our subscribers.

Posted by Livio at December 5, 2005 10:19 AM