I got the opportunity to speak at an event held by the Usability Professionals Association and LBi a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel on ‘openness of information and communities in Healthcare.’

Also there, were members of the NHS Connecting for Health team, who are developing some amazing interfaces and hardware, including this rather nice tablet.

The tablet has quite an interesting story behind it. Designed to be used by health care workers in hospitals, it has to meet an amazing list of requirements. The initial spec. was drawn up by the Connecting for Health team, and taken round a variety of manufacturers, they said they wanted something that was wipe clean, could be dropped without damage, had a five hour battery life, could be immersed in alcohol for sterilizing, had wifi, secure bluetooth, biometric security, barcode scanner, rf-id scanner, camera and just about everything else, for under £1000. Amazingly they now have the machine.

I spoke briefly on how we need to look beyond simply delivering health information, and understand the barriers to behavioural change that stop people getting the health outcomes they want. I was very pleased when, later in the day, the results of the user research project for the NHS Choices site was presented by another team. These findings broadly vindicated my position, and the fact that we are getting the same findings, on a research project that is a fraction of the size, really supports our approach.

For those interested, click the link for an outline of my talk:

According to an article in The Economist the phenomenon of user generated content has infected healthcare with millions of people contributing information about healthcare topics ranging from avian flu to acupuncture and infertility.

According to market research firm Jupiter over 20% of American internet users have created some sort of health-related content.

The Economist argues that this explosion is driven in part by the broader internet trend of more people with broadband access and easier to use software that makes content creation much simpler.