Patients are increasingly using social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook,NHS Choices, Patient Opinion and Google+, to leave feedback about NHS services, engage directly with healthcare providers and interact with the NHS in real-time.
We wanted to build something that will help NHS professionals and the public make sense of all the different channels by putting everything in one place with one set of controls.
HealthBerry is a response to the Francis report and the government's commitment to make the NHS and social care accountable to service users.
Putting Patients First, the NHS England business plan for 2014-15, describes a new focus on gathering direct feedback from patients, their families and NHS staff. And Robert Francis QC stressed the need to put people at the centre of their care by making sure that patients' voices are heard and used to deliver better services.
We want to help the NHS, social care, the third sector and private health providers measure real-time patient feedback better. We think the conversation about care and the NHS on social media channels can improve the quality of health and care services and the patient experience.
We also want to take the monitoring of social media less stressful for health and social care organisations. Monitoring and reacting to social media should be straightforward, and that's what HealthBerry is about.
Over the next couple of months, we will be working with our pilot sites to ensure that all of HealthBerry's features – the functionality, documentation, training, support and delivery – perform as expected, and meet individual organisations' requirements.
We signed up 18 trusts in the first four days of launching, and we have seen similar growth in our second week, with another eight trusts and three clinical commissioning groups expressing an interest.
I think part of this early success is that NHS professionals get it. They see it will save time. They can see it will liberate resources and provide them with a greater feeling of awareness and control.
We also have a simple sign-up process. NHS organisations register online by selecting their organisation from a pre-populated list of providers (trusts, commissioning groups, hospitals, GPs etc), which then automatically links historical and real-time patient feedback from NHS Choices, Care Connect, Patient Opinion and social media channels – the whole process takes under two minutes.
Organisations can begin monitoring patient feedback from multiple channels and engage with patients immediately in real-time. Interactions with patients appear as conversations in an inbox, whether a patient mentions an organisation on Twitter, leaves a comment on a trust's Facebook page or leaves feedback on Care Connect or Patient Opinion. Organisations receive email notifications whenever a patient starts a new conversation, and can reply directly from within HealthBerry. The software works on desktop, mobile and tablet devices.
We're very excited about the future and grateful to be working with providers such as Surrey and Borders partnership NHS foundation trust, one of many pilot sites that have been invaluable in helping us to improve our product.
I think the next big focus for us will be analytics. We're seeing a huge opportunity to create tailored dashboards for care organisations, mental health trusts, commissioning groups, GP practices and other providers. Over the next couple of months, we'll be working with these organisations to understand what metrics we should be tracking to better improve how we measure and report patient engagement and feedback.
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