Visualising patient complexity
Channel: NHS Hack Day
Date: 2015-01-26

Matt Wyatt from Public Health Wales (@complexwales) pitches the idea which became ANGEL murmuration:

How to visualise intuitive decisions?

All across the NHS practitioners are making fabulous decisions. They do it quickly and reliably and those decisions drudge the delivery of care.

Unfortunately, the healthcare organisations are almost oblivious of these decision making processes, in all but the simplest of choices. Despite the hide depth of information in an individual case note, the decisions are almost invisible at a system level.

Through a lot of observation and massing together some cognitive and complexity science, we accidentally tripped over an underlying pattern in this decision making. We have found it in every part of the health service and even people who do it really well, have difficulty explaining how it works. It turns out hat the NHS people work in a dynamic pattern similar to the myrmidon of starlings. Starlings do it by, matching speed, not colliding and heading towards the centre. The NHS has similar unwritten rules and we want to capture them and display them.