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Patient Opinion is a new website where patients and carers can share their stories of care in NHS and private sector hospitals and rank their experience using Amazon-type rankings. Through collaboration with Headshift, our website developers, the site is technically innovative (as described in detail by Livio Hughes in another nomination submission for the site).
The underlying business model is also innovative. In early market testing with patients before we built the site they really liked the idea of Patient Opinion but were very concerned that it should not be run by the NHS as no one would trust it. They were also not keen on it being run for profit as they felt that the information was ‘theirs’ i.e. had been generated by and for patients.
Simultaneous research with hospital and PCT managers showed that while they were slightly wistful about it not being run by the NHS (‘So much easier to control’ as one said), they were adamant that they did not want it run for profit by someone like Dr Foster or Boots. So we are a social enterprise with any profits returned to the NHS. Subscribers include the Healthcare Commission plus a significant number of Trusts and PCTs.
Our emphasis on mutuality and support together with our not-for-profit nature is central to how we go about things:
• Over the development period we have come to conceive of Patient Opinion as a gift economy. Just as the National Blood Transfusion Service facilitates gifts of blood from well to ill and charges a small handling charge to cover costs, so Patient Opinion is facilitating a gift economy in information between past patients and future patients.
• If we were for-profit we would charge subscribers more to view data about potential competitors. However it is in the patients’ interest that Trusts for a Trust to be able to see how comparable organisations are performing and so benchmarking across organisations is an integral feature of all subscriptions.
• As we have gained experience we have realised that Patient Opinion has the potential to develop micro-conversations between a hospital and its users. A posting from a patient increasingly triggers a response from the Trust and we are just beginning to encourage 100-word comments by the original poster on the hospital response. This format creates public conversations about micro aspects of the Trust performance such as the standard of cleanliness on a particular ward. Whilst this began as a way to show make patient feedback more effective as a lever in improving care, it is now clear that these conversations also represent a new kind of democratic exchange between tax payers and providers.
At heart Patient Opinion is about using the new ‘Web 2.0’ technologies to access collective wisdom; and allying these to new business models that allow us to grow and retain our independence whilst remaining true to mutuality and collective goals which drive patients to use the site in the first place. We believe this model may prove to be the fore runner of several aspects of civic society in the 21st century.
Paul Hodgkin
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Patient Opinion is an independent website where patients can tell their own stories and rate the care they have received at hospitals across England. The site's creative use of technology is evidenced in the use of patient weblogs, location-based services, RSS feeds and social tagging to create reliable patient-generated reputations for individual departments and services, and sharing these with prospective patients at the point of choosing a hospital. This development from social entrepreneur Dr Paul Hodgkin in partnership with Headshift is free to patients, completely confidential and easy to use:
* Patients can tell their own experience in their own words and share that with other patients in a social network of trust
* Patients can provide their own rating of services & easily compare hospital ratings using the simple search function entirely confidentially and in the comfort of their own home.
* Patients providing feedback are not required to enter any personal information into the site beyond their email address and post code, which allows the system to list the nearest treatment centres based on hospital data imported in real time from NHS.uk - the first major application of this information
* You don't have to be an expert - the simple and smart search function means patients can search for clinical specialities in their own words; a built-in social tagging system operates in the background interpreting simple language, such as the word "bones", into medical terminology
* The personal diary feature allows individual subscribed users to manage their opinions, including changing their mind on an opinion and going back and editing it. It includes a bookmarking function so patients can save a list of hospitals so they can quickly and easily see the opinions added by other patients
* The site provides NHS trusts with a tool to capture individual feedback and collects it together in a simple way and in real time - this provides the basis of the business model which involves generating income by selling reports to healthcare providers based on the patient feedback. RSS feeds allow subscribing trusts to tailor up to 100 RSS feeds to key staff across their organization ensuring that feedback speedily reaches the relevant person
* By 2008 Patient Opinion aims to be receiving over 100,000 postings from patients per year and to be directing these via RSS feeds to over 5000 managers and clinicians across the NHS and private sector. If successful Patient Opinion will have created a new feedback platform for the NHS that is financially sound, ethically-driven, free to patients, and an effective quality driver for all trusts in England.
Livio Hughes
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Patient Opinion is an independent website where patients can tell their own stories and rate the care they have received at hospitals across England. The site's creative use of technology is evidenced in the use of patient weblogs, location-based services, RSS feeds and social tagging to create reliable patient-generated reputations for individual departments and services, and sharing these with prospective patients at the point of choosing a hospital. This development from social entrepreneur Dr Paul Hodgkin in partnership with Headshift is free to patients, completely confidential and easy to use:
* Patients can tell their own experience in their own words and share that with other patients in a social network of trust.
* Patients can provide their own rating of services & easily compare hospital ratings using the simple search function entirely confidentially and in the comfort of their own home.
* Patients providing feedback are not required to enter any personal information into the site beyond their email address and post code, which allows the system to list the nearest treatment centres based on hospital data imported in real time from NHS.uk - the first major application of this information.
* You don't have to be an expert - the simple and smart search function means patients can search for clinical specialities in their own words; a built-in social tagging system operates in the background interpreting simple language, such as the word "bones", into medical terminology.
* The personal diary feature allows individual subscribed users to manage their opinions, including changing their mind on an opinion and going back and editing it. It includes a bookmarking function so patients can save a list of hospitals so they can quickly and easily see the opinions added by other patients.
* The site provides NHS trusts with a tool to capture individual feedback and collects it together in a simple way and in real time - this provides the basis of the business model which involves generating income by selling reports to healthcare providers based on the patient feedback. RSS feeds allow subscribing trusts to tailor up to 100 RSS feeds to key staff across their organization ensuring that feedback speedily reaches the relevant person.
* By 2008 Patient Opinion aims to be receiving over 100,000 postings from patients per year and to be directing these via RSS feeds to over 5000 managers and clinicians across the NHS and private sector. If successful Patient Opinion will have created a new feedback platform for the NHS that is financially sound, ethically-driven, free to patients, and an effective quality driver for all trusts in England.
Livio Hughes
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