My new blog post: how to use "appointments and scheduling" to help us learn how to build a seamless, "one system" health and care service, made up, paradoxically, of small, modular internet-era software and data services. wardle.org/platform/2019/… 
Most us of recognise that health and care need to provide a suite of computing & data services forming a platform on which a range of user-centred solutions can be built, underpinned by robust open standards?
Let's move from command & control to empowerment & collaboration.
Let's move from command & control to empowerment & collaboration.
Just as an airline might provide their own booking portal, the real power comes from them also making their booking services available to others via APIs, so others can mash together different services and create solutions hitherto not considered.
But I am not advocating big-bang transformational change. Instead, we should look for the smallest things we can do now that deliver benefit & teach us valuable lessons on how to proceed. We need to be agile, not only in how we write code, but in how we fund and manage our work.
This approach means moving away from conventional planning and procurement cycles to one that enables fast-feedback, metered funding and teams focused on delivering a product, rather than working on a project. standards.cymru/posts/images/x…
Our patients, their families and carers want our health services in Wales to work as a single seamless system, and the professionals that look after them, want to collaborate & work together to deliver seamless care. gov.wales/sites/default/…
Appointments and scheduling could be a useful way of demonstrating the benefit of a new type of management and software development approach, that moves away from a waterfall approach to planning, and instead uses a tangible specific user need to *learn*.
We would need to build a new national pathway service - and build a team to do that, to provide a compelling, easy-to-use standards-based API that provides a "seamless" way to interact with appointments, schedules and care pathways across multiple departments and organisations.
For those who don't know much about technology, its easy to think that the way to make something feel like a "single system" is to build it as a single monolithic system. Those people might have good intentions, but it is not the way to deliver reliable software at pace.
The solution is not to replace all the different organisation & department systems with a single application.. We have seen what a waste of time replacing PAS with multiple instances of "Welsh PAS" has been, failing to deliver our wider strategic goals.
The Amazon.com store feels like a seamless single system, but it is *not*. allthingsdistributed.com/2019/08/modern…
We know we cannot develop software at pace when we don't break our problems up into smaller, manageable chunks that can be solved independently by empowered teams. Modularisation is key. The key question is: do we in Wales have the appetite and skills to adopt such an approach?
Let me know what you think. How do we build the capability to deliver this? How can we overcome the challenges I've outlined? What other challenges and obstacles are in our way? How do we stop framing new programmes of work using the old ways of thinking?
