At this year’s iaptus user conference, Product Owner Claire Tuckey shared some highlights of the work that the iaptus developers have been focussing on over the past year, and gave us an overview of the roadmap for the coming 12 months.
Claire oversees the work of the developers, deciding how updates are prioritised and planning the roadmap for development. Her personal mission is to “create a system that our clients hold as the gold standard, because it is reliable, easy to use, and allows staff to spend more time with patients.”
Highlights from the past 12 months
1. Two Factor Authentication
If you don’t have an N3 connection, or if you work from home and use iaptus, you need Two Factor Authentication (2FA). We’ve effectively rebuilt this functionality this year, enabling us to increase security and stability, and allowing more control over tokens.
2. Prism
We introduced Prism at last year’s iaptus user conference, and have now are now at pilot stage. We’re working with six providers of online therapy to ensure that we’re able to cover the different needs and workflows of each of our customers. We plan to confirm a date for the end of the pilot soon, and will roll Prism out on a service-by-service basis. Simply get in touch with your account manager to join the waiting list.
3. FGM Dataset
The Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) dataset is part of the new MHSDS. We have created a new questionnaire in iaptus, plus three new Hypercube reports that can be submitted quarterly to the HSCIC. The submission process for this data is slightly different from usual, so if you’ve not yet submitted, let your account manager know and they’ll be happy to talk you through it. Any further updates will be made automatically and we’ll let you know what those are as they are added.
4. Online self referrals
We extended this functionality, and are now seeing about 5,000 self referrals come through iaptus from our forms every month. User feedback has helped us to refine and enhance this feature, and we now offer forms for client self-referral as well as referrals by professionals. This means that GPs can complete a form, sending information directly to iaptus to be approved and actioned by clinicians. Again, your account manager will be pleased to hear from you with any questions and requests for custom forms.
5. Dashboard reports
A big project! Dashboards have been rolled out to all of our iaptus adults clients now, and will be rolling out for our CYP clients later this year. The reports include KPIs, and recreate HSCIC reports. They offer a simple and clear way for you to benchmark your service, and allow you to display your data visually, extracting graphs and charts.
6. iaptus version 3
We’ve been doing a lot of work internally on our processes to ensure we’re working as efficiently and as effectively as possible. This year, we’ve also invested a lot of time in training our developers on new technologies. In fact 15% of developer time this year was devoted to training. That’s a big investment in skills and knowledge which will enable us to continually improve iaptus.
We’ve been working very hard behind the scenes on the MHSDS, which has required a full change to our data structure, spanning CAMHS, CYP, learning difficulties, maternity and secondary care. There are over 300 fields that could have been added to iaptus to meet the needs of the new MHSDS, and we’re very grateful to the CYP services who helped us to identify the relevant tables.
Drum roll, please…
7. Recurring diary events research
Improved diary functionality topped our poll for the most sought-after iaptus developments this year, and we’re really pleased to be working now on the user journey for both recurring events and patient appointments. Jenna’s afternoon workshop delved into this in more depth.
Headline projects for this year
Recurring diary events and appointments We’re looking forward to completing this project and rolling out the new functionality.
New testing and deploy processes We plan to begin deploying much more frequently – daily in fact, from Monday to Thursday. This means we can be much more flexible, and make smaller deploys that are lower risk, which if needed, can be rolled back very quickly and with low impact.
Constant process improvement As usual, we’ll be working hard under the hood to ensure that iaptus is as fast, stable and reliable as it can possibly be.
More MHSDS changes affecting the whole of mental health In the next year, IAPT adult services dataset will be merging to the MHSDS, so we’ll be focussing on making sure that the relevant new fields are created in iaptus. The work we’ve done for CYP services means that we’re well on the way with our preparations for this.
Employment support There will be more employment datasets coming out soon, in partnership with the DWP and we should have more information about that in the autumn.
Long Term Conditions and Medically Unexplained Symptoms There will be a new focus on this data and we’ll be creating new fields and questionnaires.
… and more We’re leaving some flexibility in our plans because we want to be able to respond quickly to the changing needs of you, our users.
As usual, if you have any questions or comments for us, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you soon.
