NHS Direct

NHS Direct receive an award for excellence

NHS Direct was recently awarded the ‘Excellence in major healthcare IT development’ accolade at this year’s eHealth Insider awards.

The award highlights NHS Direct’s successful collaboration with software providers InferMed to develop a major IT project that has improved patients’ access to NHS trusted health advice and information online. The project is aligned to the wider NHS ambition to improve the choice available to patients when they need to access healthcare. NHS Direct was one of three finalists shortlisted for the award.

NHS Direct has developed its award-winning suite of online health and symptom checkers over the last year and now has 40 tools. They are available on the NHS Direct website and cover a wide range of problems such as dental pain, diarrhoea and vomiting, abdominal pain, back pain, rashes, burns, and colds and flu. There is also the opportunity for patients to get more specialist advice on issues such as mental health, contraception, sexual health matters and pregnancy problems.

The health and symptom checkers work by asking the user a series of questions. Depending on the information provided, users may be offered self-care advice so that they can manage their symptoms at home, or it may suggest that further advice is sought from another health provider. A call back from an NHS Direct nurse advisor is only a click away if a further assessment is recommended.

Building on its reputation for trusted and reliable web services, and in response to the growing popularity of smartphones, NHS Direct launched a mobile app for Android and iPhone devices at the end of May 2011. The NHS Direct app gives patients convenient access to its range of health and symptom checkers, wherever they are.

The online health and symptom checkers are used on the web around 20,000 times a day and the mobile app has been used 900,000 times since its launch in May 2011.

Want to have NHS Direct’s online health and symptoms checkers on your website?

NHS Direct is making its online health and symptom checkers freely available to public, private or charity sector organisations in England to use on their own websites. The checkers can appear in their entirety within other organisations’ websites, and can be fully customised to match host websites.

For more information about putting NHS Direct’s online health and symptom checkers on your organisation’s website, visit Partnerships. Alternatively, contact Head of Partnerships, Owain Davies on 0207 599 4227, or send him an email.