Patient List, a software application, made available as open source, making it easier for doctors to hand over patients, won the NHS Hack Day 2012 which took place in London on 26 and 27 May 2012.

Some 120 attendees, including software developers and health care specialists worked together to create health care solutions to solve a part of the daily problems of the United Kingdom’s health care system.

The event organiser, Dr Carl Reynolds, provided links to publicly available datasets and listed relevant application programming interfaces. In two days, no less than fourteen applications were submitted to a panel of experts.

The winning application, Patient List, uses the standardised electronic patient records from a hospital, to provide doctors with a list of their patients and allowing them to create to-do lists and to update patient care records and especially to perform easy patient handover.

In a report on the “Hackathon”, eHealth Insider quotes Sir Liam Donaldson, former chief medical officer for England, who says that Patient List could help "correct some of the problems that currently occur in the NHS."

Patient List's source code is made available on Github. It is currently available under the MIT open source licence. “This could change”, suggests Rob Dyke, the healthcare IT service company responsible for the application’s development. "We are still discussing it. I expect the licence to be towards the permissive end of the spectrum."

eHealth Insider writes that if the jury had been made up of the attending software developers, the winner would have been 'Mobile Formulary',an application that scrapes data from the British National Formulary website. It then republishes this data, making access easier and saving general practitioners £60 (about €75) annually for accessing the data through the Formulary site.

David Miller, one of the developers of the applicatiion says that the group has not yet discussed licences. "The code will almost certainly be a permissive open source license. But the core data driving our application is subject to various copyright protections."

Further Information:

• Original news article – Joinup
• NHS Hack Day 2012
• Patient List
• Mobile Formulary
• Relevant eHealth Insider article ‘Hack the programme’
• Relevant eHealth Insider article ‘Handover System wins NHS Hac Day’