* How user-created feedback can improve services
* How navigating services can be made more simple
* How users can best help themselves to help each other
* How services can be combined in order to increase reach/take up
* How better information can improve customer experience

Please point us in the direction of some good ones ... and if we choose your recommendation we’ll send you some PublicOffice paraphernalia to spice up your desk and notice board. These examples will be used to inspire public servants to think WIBBI..... Get recommending! 

A £12.7bn upgrade of IT systems throughout the NHS in England will not be completed for at least another six years, four years behind schedule, parliament’s spending watchdog disclosed today. Revealing that the scale of the delay to the system was worse than previously thought, the National Audit Office said plans for a national electronic record of the medical files of 50 million patients might not come to fruition until 2014-15.

Grrrr....yawn.

Meanwhile the real world moves briskly in a far more attractive direction. An IBM-Hipaat alliance is the latest - after Google-Cleveland Clinic and Microsoft Healthvault - to offer user-controlled online health records. They send me a press release:

The IBM-HIPAAT collaboration extends patient-driven privacy to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Electronic Health Records (EHRs), Personal Health Records (PHRs) and Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). Combined IBM and HIPAAT technologies allow patients to easily specify who is granted access to their personal health information (PHI), what information can be accessed and when. They enable caregivers to implement and enforce patient consent directives, providing “break the glass” access to PHI and EHR data in emergency-care situations, where appropriate.

This commercially-available patient-directed solution is a privacy-based approach to securely controlling PHI access across diverse healthcare applications and settings. When installed in HIE environments as the “consent engine,” Privacy eSuite empowers patients and designated providers to create and record privacy directives. The software then evaluates a provider’s authorization to access a patient’s PHI based on such directives. With the combined offerings, a patient can restrict a particular clinician from accessing PHI, even if that clinician – based on medical role – would typically be granted such access. All access requests are recorded and an audit trail is created.

Nothing on pricing but I bet it wont be costing UK taxpayers anything in tne £6bn-30bn price range bandied about for Connecting for Health.

Wibbi we canned our daft centrally-controlled electronic health records system and the D’oH! just asked Google, Microsoft and IBM-Hipaat to confirm to a standard the NHS was prepared to work to. Then we could choose which sort of electronic patient record we used, and our data wouldn’t be subjected to bossy fishing expeditions from national terrorist-prevention services trying to work out whether we eat the right amount of fruit and veg, or the wrong sort of shellfish. Why will it take so many years and so many billions of pounds before we come to our senses?

I suppose the four year delay gives people more time to opt out of centralised health records. I hope our opt-out is final; it would be a drag to have to renew it every year like a pointless TV licence or car tax disk. 

Wednesday morning colleagues of course have a strong expectation that I will be chosen to replace Gus when the good man goes (off to run Tony’s Faith Foundation, no doubt).

But even as an exceptionally gifted amateur, one can never rest on one’s laurels. It has to be said that colleagues find fulfilment of the Outer Skin of the Professional Skills for Government Onion - ‘broader experience’ - a challenge (although my non-executive Chairmanship of the Surrey Gardens Trust has stood me in good stead thus far). So I have agreed with Gus that I am the obvious person to be the Broader Experience Champion amongst us.

Of course, the National School’s use of words such as ‘vital’, ‘core requirement’ and ‘mandatory’ need to be understood in context, but when CSMB signed up to the PSG implementation plan in June 2005, they did put out some outline guidance which suggested it might be necessary for us to do more than pay mere lip service to this idea. CSMB were concerned that some departments would be put under pressure to offer real opportunities for staff to gain operational delivery experience. I don’t think this needs to ruffle feathers or cause any unnecessary activity. We need to be flexible about what counts, and be seen to provide all with suitable opportunities to become upskilled.

As the paper I helped draft (PSG 146:ii) made clear, there is no real substitute for hands-on experience. Given that there is no new money to support broader experience attainment and departments are urged to identify cost-neutral ways to encourage staff to gain broader experience, it is pleasing to note the selfless enthusiasm shown by the trade association, Intellect, to match colleagues to opportunities for deep immersion within the private sector. I’m sure Gill’s Outward Deployment Directorate can swiftly effect such a managed move for anyone who needs one: putting one close to ‘delivery’ without of course expecting too much. (And do send my secretary an electronic mail if the position of Secretary on the SGT is of interest. Our next meeting will take in a private visit of Sissinghurst, to which I am much looking forward).

Rather neatly, it occurs to me that that would also provide something to put in the “professional expertise” box, which is always a bit of a tricky one. Karen and Vicky always look insufferably smug when that comes up, just because they have professions to be head of, while the rest of us have to rely on the broader cultural palette of the generalist. But a few weeks with Intellect would be plenty to justify putting IT down - and once we had a few bright chaps who had done that, we could stop recruiting Heads of Computing from outside, who are intolerably expensive, often excessively Scottish, and for some very strange reason want to be called Chief Information Officers, although none of them appears to me to have any proper qualifications as librarian.

A propos it struck me as I was deadheading the very last of the daffodils over the weekend how valuable it would be to add two hours’ of compulsory gardening each week to the national curriculum. Today’s youth would benefit greatly from some peaceful, valuable work in the great outdoors. Let them cast off their hoodies for an hour or two, put on an old suit and enjoy some fresh air and exercise as they happily learn the finer points of Linnaean taxonomy.

In this way they too could broaden their own experience in the same way that more fortunate amongst us do already.

Now, which politician will be brave enough to abolish the silly and grossly unfair TV ownership licence? (Currently 139.50 Pounds per household but equivalent to over 174 Pounds of gross annual income and especially harsh on low-income households.) The whole ghastly TV Licensing bureaucracy, online service and enforcement arm could then be abolished, making further significant savings.

Next, although the car ownership tax has so recently been increased and made even more complicated; which brave politician will abolish it - and the DVLA? The task of administering the safety & road-worthiness of vehicles could be handed to the insurance industry. Again, this would remove a large, expensive, unnecessary bureaucracy together with its unnecessary “enforcement” activities.

Wibbi: All politicians and all governments looked for ways to simplify matters, rather than ways to automate obsolete bureaucracies.

Update: Don’t miss HMRC’s video podcast which tries to explain this service: It’s easy to mock the upbeat tone and phrases such as “… a simple five step process ...” but it’s a good attempt and reasonably clear to people who have used the paper forms.

Note: Ordinary PAYE employees are shielded from the horrendous complexity of the UK’s Tax and NI system. This video gives a tiny insight.

Wibbis:
1. Instead of using “print” from the web-browser, I’d like the option to download PDFs of the completed forms.
2. Although you’re typing figures taken from PAYE & NI forms, it would still be useful if all boxes had descriptive labels (or even descriptive help) rather than labels such as “1e.”
3. Is it really essential for all UK companies to files this information in the short space between the end of the tax year and the 19th May?

Separately, there are interesting differences between the (private sector) incentives attached to the latest “Club Card” loyalty scheme and the (public sector) penalties attached to government schemes:

In a country which perhaps has more Tesco stores than Post Offices: Tesco’s offers to “do its best” to return my keys if my bar-coded Club Card tag is attached to the keyring - ie. an incentive to carry the tag and to keep Tesco’s database update with the correct address.

Would the national or local government do the same if I lose my wallet containing my spooky new ITSO smart-card bus-pass (aka “Citizen Card")?

Wibbis:

1. Scrap the UK government & EU ID projects: We don’t need them; we can’t afford them. (We’ll even allow the government to give the “credit-crunch” as an excuse!)
2. More (any?) joined-up thinking about how ordinary people could benefit from any new e-government schemes.

Here is, I fear, our answer, from the great clunking fist himself. What has he done wrong, asks Beeb R4 this Sunday morning?

I’ve spent too little time thinking how we can get our arguments across to the people

Noooooooooooooo no no! Too much time thinking about that. Not enough time cultivating respectful listening in the right way.

This is the personal CardSpace of a Microsoft employee, who has been closely involved in the trial. It features an Eduserv Athens card and a few example cards for other services that could be potentially useful to consumers.