Creating a shared view of our capabilities in Personalised Prevention Services

This is a repost of the recent DPSP design history that Maia Tarling-Hunter and I pubhlished about how as Personalised Prevention Services (PPS) we have created a shared view of the capabilities we are developing.

Context

Personalised Prevention Services began following the findings from the Personalised Prevention Platform discovery and building on the opportunity of NHS Health Check online, which offers first-of-kind self-testing and risk calculation service. We have now matured into a portfolio of 6 services covering different stages of our prevention user journey. Each of our services is deliberately developing digital capabilities that solve distinct parts of the challenge to support people to understand their health risks and make healthier choices.

We want to develop reusable, common components and capabilities for use both across our PPS services and the wider system. In the future, these will offer a joined-up experience for users and be the building blocks for the health system to deliver a reimagined end-to-end digital prevention journey.

Given our growth and our vision for reuse and end-to-end integration, we needed to make sure all our teams were aligned and contributing to our strategy. We also wanted to reduce unnecessary duplication and identify opportunities for deeper collaboration.

What we did

Mini workshops with each team

We ran a series of mini workshops with each team to map the capabilities and components that each service is developing that contribute against our PPS end-to-end journey. We also asked attendees to map the capabilities that they are reusing that exist elsewhere in NHSE (such as Cohorting as a Service, or the Patient Data Manager) and the wider system (like local population health management capability or face-to-face services).

Creating our service map

We have brought together the conversations from our mini workshops to create a map of the PPS journey with all the different capabilities our services are delivering now. The details of what each team is doing for each capability is clearly distinguished on the map alongside where capabilities beyond PPS were being used. This allows us to identify overlap and opportunities for collaboration.

Bringing teams together around our service map

During our last PPS quarterly planning day, we ran a speed-dating session around the service map. People were invited to review the map and identify topics for discussion that spanned across teams. The idea was to support joining up across teams and we encouraged teams to take away actions to continue collaboration beyond the session.

What next

The service map we’ve developed is a good articulation of the current scope of work, areas of overlap and how our individual services will evolve next. As a result, we have noticed a significant increase in a more joined-up thinking across teams within PPS over the last few months.

Next, we need to work more across teams to identify priority opportunities to join up our services for an end-to-end digital prevention journey, led by what we are learning through research and testing with our users. For example, where NHS Health Check online, which currently helps people understand their health risks, could integrate with the Help to Stay Healthy and AI Health Coach capabilities to support people to build healthy habits.

To help with this work, we have been looking at the technical components within our existing services to understand the opportunities for reuse within our strategic priorities. For example, we are understanding the effort it would take to reuse our current blood pressure capture capability from NHS Health Check online as part of a stand-alone journey for blood sampling case finding or a different health assessment journey. Understanding this effort will help us plan and prioritise our roadmap.

In articulating our PPS capabilities, we are seeing crossover with wider DPSP, particularly the digital vaccinations team’s development of a Service Stages Framework. We are continuing to share learnings across our teams to consider opportunities to further develop this work.