Week 12 2024

Who did I meet this week?

I met the amazing Tara Humphreys and Dan Bunstone in a workshop to learn more about PCN's and General Practice in General. We have a product that partners love but our brand awareness is in need of some work. We are often referred to as like Babylon which is frustrating as they don't seem to have a positive association with them with regards to the NHS.

It was also good to see the UK leadership team to align on our priorities for next quarter. We are investing heavily in the UK and have a huge program of work ahead of us which will improve our primary care offer even further.

I met with one of our project teams for a project we call Precious.
The theme of the discussions were quiet depressing as they revolved around the central assurance process for EPS. It's stifling innovation and facilitating the duopoly of EMIS and SystmOne in relation to Primary Care, we believe the small assurance team is focussing on secondary care but the updates on the website indicate nothing, an update is expected end of 2023 (not a typo).

The NHS has done the hard work in this country on the technical side of things with EPS, we’re way further ahead than Sweden, France and Norway for example, however the box ticking assurance process is closed meaning it's little more than a useless innovation. Our product impact in other markets is clear to see, but unfortunately in the UK we’re having to pay excessive license fees for bloated tech at the point of primary care prescribing when everything else required is delivered in our own system. The clinician experience sucks too, having to jump out of a fast, modern, user need driven application so they can prescribe in one of the two is painful and inefficient.

What did I learn?

I learned a lot from Tara and Dan about Primary Care that challenged some old assumptions I had about General Practice. I also came to the realisation I have been very inward focusing from the UK perspective over the past few years while adapting to my role from UK specific to a European focus.

I learned how we build API's these days in our MJOG product, work that Leander has been leading. It will be great to see this approach roll out across our stack as we evolve some of our architecture.

What did I achieve?

We have been planning on reorganised ourselves in a reverse Conway's Law configuration recently and I am pleased to say that is now in production for beta testing. While doing so I wanted to redefine parts of our expectations in ways of working. During our significant growth stage we didn't always make the best technical decisions in favour of expediency, so creating the conditions for people to tidy up our technical estate is important to us, but it can often come second over features. The engineers are loving the new setup, the feedback has been very positive around the ways of working and the impact they are having is surprisingly immediate and significant.

I wrote a blog post on how we tackled a product market fit problem in the UK for General Practice which should be published this coming week.

I also wrote a post for my personal blog about blogging,  I feel a real sense of urgency to write more and regret I haven't done more, this came from a 5 minute conversation with my son.

What could I have done better?

• I received some feedback about not turning up to a meeting (declining close to the start time), this went straight to my boss and not to me which I find frustrating, not that this caused an issue, but I prefer feedback immediate and directly to clear up any confusion and to be able to address it promptly.
  
  I have spent 2 days in France end of last week, 4 at Centre Parcs with my family for a much needed break,  followed by 2 days in London, which is a total of 8 consecutive days where I haven't had the usual luxury of playing calendar Tetris as I have been back to back busy. In hindsight I should have put an Out of Office on with auto decline to new requests during the whole period.

What are you looking forward to next week?

• A week without travel, after living out of a backpack for a chunk of time I am looking forward to sleeping in my own bed and a more typical routine.
• Writing down the expectations around ways of working taking into consideration more feedback from trying things out.
• Spending time with my team, we have all been so busy lately we haven't spent as much time as I would like with my team and direct reports.
• My plane has been awaiting a new magneto for a while now meaning it's been grounded. It's hopefully going to be installed and approved as airworthy again this week. I only have 2 weeks before I lose 90 day currency in a complex aircraft (retractable gear and variable pitch prop) which would mean another check ride. I have been flying other aircraft though and picked up my night rating and instrument rating while I have been at it.

Things I read

• I finished reading "It doesn't have to be this crazy at work" - this was a quick and easy read and has some extreme views on office culture in a tech company. As we have been making changes I wanted to read perspectives that challenge the status quo.