panel discussion hosted by William Heath with Sam Hudson, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement; Julia Holding, NHS West Midlands; Glen Griffiths, interactivhealth; Steve Pashley, Health2works

Richard Smith , chairman of Patients Know Best asks – is the main barrier actually us? how many of us have access to our medical record online? I do, but it’s total rubbish – you can find out far more about me on the web than you can from these

Q to Sam Hudson-what is your experience of the level of knowledge people want to use?

A – it’s about ‘my’ technology – how do we participate with health and social services? people want face-to-face interaction, still want paper, TV, and phones. We need to look at our audience – who do we want to listen to and where are they currently having conversations?

Glen – I help senior managers and clinicians have conversations – I got frustrated as an enthusiast as potential of web technologies to transform relationships with patients and medical staff – one of the things we’re doing is trying to accelerate the use of web technologies in general around clinicians and disease groups – small groups of people generated loads of ideas about how tech can make their lives easier and create more value in their relationships with each other. It was eye opening to see just how easy these things are – people just aren’t curious enough about how tech in part could transform the quality of relationships between patients and carers- we need to find ways to help them see the potential

Getting in touch with communities is really pertinent. Communities are designed in lots of different ways – can we use the same tools and tech for all? We need to identify what people are saying, how they’re saying it and where.

Paul Hodgkin, founder of Patient Opinion-  the issue is the technology almost too seductive – it takes time to work out what we are going to do with it. It is part tech, part business model, part a complex dance between NHS, population and providers like us – getting tension right between what only the state could do and where the place is for all these other initiatives – and how do we use these and the power of the web to transform this to be useful and productive. The combination of tech, people, business model, and balance between state and civil society is not easy

Gary Ashby, Programme Director NHS choices: Our role is not actually to be a website – you don’t go to the doctor for the building – you go for the content because you trust it. Having said that if you go on the web and you type in NHS you would expect to find an NHS website. We don’t actually spend millions of pound on the website – actually the site is cheap the expensive part is the money spent on making sure the information is correct.

I don’t think the competition should be one way or the other – it should be about both. But – how do you make that into a coherent story to help improve the services? We need to work together and share the information so we can feed it back into the NHS. I want to get the local NHS involved- this is where things like patient opinion can have big role- get local entities to understand what to do with all of this

Q- a lot of what we’re talking about applies to many pub services – is there anything intrinsic in NHS that means we need to think about differently?

Karen Dooley, Dignity in Care – we should use NHS to work in the way of upmystreet – information populating around your local area

Heather Leach – are we trying to build a relationship or provide info? roles are very different

Laura Bunt, NESTA – often ideas come from professionals and users within the service – what’s the mechanism for finding out what the issues are -do they come from outside the existing system?

We here are unrepresentative of the typical users- people who need these services the most are the most unlikely to use them – 10million people in UK not online (digital inclusion issues)

Departments within health service need to talk to each other – the communication problem is bigger than getting people to use online tools  – communication is key

There is a challenge over 3-5 years for public services, especially financially – we need to make sure we can say why this is important, what it’s going to cost, and have a clear offer about what we’re offering

Julia Holding – form needs to follow function – technology first is the wrong method. We’re commissioning a digital ecosystem which is about making info for opportunities for people to engage where they are and what they’re doing. We need to make sure that whatever we do makes a difference to quality of service, if it doesn’t we shouldn’t be doing it. Making sure we focus on content, to a large exent user-driven -  content not control. The NHS needs to be brave, remove the firewalls and harness the conversations that are going on