Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Web apps for healthcare

At the moment I'm trying to gather some communities stories about health and other aspects of wellbeing as part of a WEA Stoke community involvement project. Later in the year we hope to bring together some willing developers to help build these tools.
Here are a few ideas that I noted down from discussions at the first hack/hacker/hacky coffee in Birmingham:
  • A sort of Mapumental for choosing GPs, where GP data can be visualised on a map and information highlighted depending on what is important to the user, for example by satisfaction ratings, language, whether particular languages are spoken, how appointments can be booked etc.
  • A text service where you send your postcode and the phone numbers of the nearest 5 GPs who are taking on patients are sent back.
  • A map of hospitals showing waiting times, ideally in real time or by trend.
If anyone knows of these tools already being developed, knows data sources or would like to have a go, please speak up.

One more useful pointer for anyone developing content-rich website was this: the vast majority of people finding your website through a search are looking for the most basic information, such as opening times. So keep it simple.

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