Let’s Do Digital is a community of healthcare professionals, educators and technologists who are passionate about health-tech innovation, literacy, and learning. Their annual conference provides a forum for exploring radical and alternative ideas for the future of digital health. Let’s Do Digital 2025 was held last month in Painswick.
NortHFutures PI Abi Durrant joined a panel at the conference, convened by Let's Do Digital Mentor Basil Bekdash, (Sheffield Children's NHS Foundation Trust), about the future of health and care records. Abi was joined by Geoff Revill of Safe Space One, Charlie McCay, Information Standards Architect, Ramsey Systems, and Max Perry, Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Edinburgh who has studied the history of the medical record.
Basil asked: ‘Health and care records: Do we need a blank slate?’ Who has agency to work with the records? The panel discussed how healthcare records originally served to ‘show’ the coordination involved between people in producing clinical knowledge. With the advent of AI- and data-driven tools it also remains important to ‘show’ how best practice and professional record standards depends upon achieving shared understanding within a community of experts. Drawing upon NortHFutures’ activities and thinking about other kinds of sense making between people, Abi raised how the safe spaces that patients and service users value for clinical consultations or community-based support are not always ‘shown’ in the data that is collected on record. Some clinicians and patients find workarounds and effective ways to communicate that may not be visible to AI to read and learn from. So: how can we show AI what best practice and good record keeping looks like?
The event also provided a lovely opportunity to meet up with the South Yorkshire Digital Health Hub team members Hannah Clemmens and Marjorie Da Costa Abreu!
