Christmas is a busy time for elves, digital or otherwise. The Digital Elf project is all about self contained nuggets of digital transformation that perform a repetitive job to relieve some burden from hard-pressed healthcare workers. In the case of our Twelf Days of Christmas, think of the pages of this site as those digital elves, spreading the word while the masters get on with Christmas.

Recap

Let’s recap what digital elves have been busy with over Christmas:

  • Day 1: Starting projects in minutes not months
  • Day 2: Starting programming via Excel
  • Day 3: Tools for programming
  • Day 4: A real program from start to end: Roman Numerals
  • Day 5: Goodbye Excel. Hello Pandas!
  • Day 6: Regular Expressions
  • Day 7: Jupyter notebooks
  • Day 8: Data exploration
  • Day 9: Graphs and charts
  • Day 10: Document production
  • Day 11: Harvesting interesting radiology cases: AutoTeaCH

Since we are recapping, we would like to mention another digital elf: Recap, a leaflet elf. Recap was an idea generated in a workshop with clinicians, patients and carers, hosted by Nottinghamshire Healthcare. Clinicians were tired of having to give out paper leaflets, getting them printed and keeping them up to date. Patients and carers were finding them anachronistic in the age of the web. Why not give patients their own web-based account and into it put personalised videos, podcasts, information websites and, yes, leaflets. All that material could be managed online, and a lot of it could be given automatically when the patient reaches the right stage in the pathway. Unlike paper leaflets, patients could easily give feedback and ask for more, while clinicians get to see what is helpful and what is not.

Like all good microprojects we built the initial version of Recap in just a few weeks. It has gained many, many features since then. In fact the code repository today shows over 2,300 commits. Even with all that change Recap has run continuously for over ten years. In that time it has dispensed over 1.5 million information prescriptions. Over 44,000 Trust patients use it, in areas as varied as children and young people’s mental health, cardiac rehab and pre-admission services.

It is not just useful for replacing paper leaflets. In cardiac rehab a study showed patients using Recap were 42% less likely to be readmitted after six months, leading to savings of over £1.5 million per year in one Trust alone. Little elves can make a big difference.

Now is the time for Digital Elf

We want to spread Digital Elf. It means IT and Doctors working together on small projects. Until very recently there was a gulf between what IT could do and what Doctors could reasonably be expected to do themselves in terms of IT. That meant bigger teams, more organisation, longer timescales and bigger budgets. But the arrival of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, has suddenly closed the gap. Anyone can ask ChatGPT to write some code. See our Day 9 article for some examples. So long as the request is reasonably small (asking for a complete EPR won’t work) it is likely that the response that follows a few seconds later will be working code, or near enough. These days, with Pandas, matplotlib and so forth, that small amount of code can do a lot, enough to make a difference to your service or department. So, we don’t need big risky projects and doctors do not need years of training in IT to make a difference with IT, they just need some support and guidance from their IT colleagues.

An invitation to an NHS digital epiphany

January 6th is the date of the arrival of the Magi to present the infant Jesus with gold, frankincense and myrrh. At a second coming, she, they or he would be better served with a laptop, mobile phone and a power bank to spread the work of God in the spirit of the Digital Elf Project.

We have commissioned leading AI artist Dall-E (not Banks-E) to capture such a hypothetical meeting by using the prompt An image in in the style of El Greco: Three elf kings giving the infant Jesus gifts of a laptop, a mobile phone and a power bank

We wish the NHS well in 2024, but we strongly advise her to get her approach to IT more balanced and ambitious for concrete results: fewer grand plans and more on-the-ground microproject digital transformation, please.

Disciples to the cause are needed - many more than twelf this time - sign up and join the Digital Elf Project.