When talking this morning on Skype with my good friend Chris Quigley, from the UK-based company Delib, he informed me that he was in the hospital for a slipped disc in his back. The amazing thing is that while hospitalized, he created an open innovation platform for the hospital called Help Us Improve Kings. This platform allows staff, patients and visitors the ability to submit, comment and rate ideas to improve Kings Hospital. It’s amazing how powerful open innovation is, and how one person can truly make a difference using technology as a tool. Good job Chris!
You can watch an hospital bed introduction to Help Us Improve Kings from Chris here.
Below is some additional information taken from the website.
Patients can help too!
This site has been set up by Chris Quigley (me) – a patient of King’s College Hospital. I think King’s is a great Hospital and have been treated very well since I’ve been here (since Thursday 26th November ’09), however lying here in my bed got me thinking about how King’s could improve. King’s is good. It might even be great. But how could King’s become an “awesome” hospital.
And the answer to that – has to be to use the intelligence and experience of its patients (customers) and employees (surgeons, doctors, nurses, cleaners) and others (like visitors and suppliers) to help improve the everyday quality of service of the Hospital.
And the kinds of improvements I’m talking about are not necessarily big changes – but the small things that affect patients everyday life and the overall success of a hospital.
With this mission in mind I lying in my hospital bed – with the help of a couple of tech-colleagues from my company Delib – set up this patient crowd-sourcing site in a couple of hours to help empower patients and help improve Kings College – and hopefully the wider NHS.
Some “crowd-sourcing” context
The idea of gathering ideas from customers isn’t new. Companies like Dell and Starbucks have been running these customer ideas hubs for ages – well I say ages, more like months! Starbucks run something called “My Starbucks idea” and Dell run something called “Dell ideastorm”.
Crowd-sourcing is also massively popular amongst US government department’s due to Obama’s “Open and Transparent Governance” memorandum, with lots of innovation going on amongst different government departments. For example, The Department of Homeland Security ran acrowd-sourcing project amongst their 200,000 staff to help create their departments next 4 year plan.
Turning ideas into action
So the next big step is for us to turn our ideas into action – into actual improvements to Kings College Hospital and to its patients. To do this we’re in the process of talking to the Patient Involvement team so they can take over the site and turn all the ideas into action!
Hey Dustin – cheers for the blog post. Am still in hospital – but the wonders of wifi is keeping my web2.0 wheels moving!
That is so cool. Would be interesting to see the life cycle as to when someone at hospital noticed and that is was as cool as it is.