Planning for July to September 2024

Teams working on the NHS App get together every 3 months and share their plans for the next quarter. This is an opportunity to identify dependencies, duplication and areas for collaboration. It’s also a chance for product, engineering and design leads to share some high-level messages about priorities and principles.

Here are the messages I shared:

Top-level goals

There are 2 main top-level goals for the NHS App as a product:

• Reduce the burden on frontline staff
  Reduce the number of tasks required of all staff at GP surgeries and NHS call centres, and clerical staff at hospitals, by supporting users to self-serve and self-care.
• Reduce barriers to care
  Ensure that the NHS App can be used by all, and that features and integrations are available to the largest possible share of our user base.

We also have 1 goal for ourselves as a team:

• Improve the user experience of the NHS App
  Make it as easy, quick and reliable as possible for users to complete tasks, so that the NHS App is their preferred way of doing these.

Overall, we have a long-term ambition to make 30% all interactions digital first via the NHS App and NHS website.

Big bets and roadmap priorities for 2024/25

We have 3 big bets — or themes — for 2024/25:

• Expand usage of existing NHS App features by making them available to more users, increasing awareness of them, and improving the linked profiles feature.
• Extend self-serve to give users more control over their health records, test results, appointments and prescriptions.
• Scale prevention and wellbeing by making the NHS App a channel through which people can improve their health.

Sat underneath these big bets — or themes — are a number of high priority deliverables for 2024/25 that we can group into 3 buckets:

• Wellness: vaccination campaigns, digital therapeutics, screening reminders, NHS health checks
• Illness: GP and secondary care test results, time-sensitive GP messages, prescription order tracking, nominate a distance-selling pharmacy, historical secondary care appointments, inpatient, day case, community and mental health appointments, GP Connect PFS APIs, GP appointment bookings and referrals via BaRS
• Enablers: new integration management approach and integration strategy, apply for proxy, linked profile improvements, campaign card and personalised campaigns, inbox filtering, native shell migration, native maps integration, local unlock / offline access, digital wallet

NHS App teams will be working on plenty of other important things that are not listed here. This list represents the things with the highest visibility.

A/B testing capability

We will soon have access to a new A/B testing tool. This is very exciting because it offers us the opportunity to experiment with different versions of a thing at scale, meaning we can be more confident about the changes we make to the NHS App.

This tool gives us more options for testing with users, especially for smaller changes to content and the user interface. It can help us to test hunches and assumptions faster and with a greater number of users. It’s worth having a discussion in your team about how it could enhance the research you do.

It’s important to note that A/B tests result in a change to the production version of the NHS App for some users, so will need similar levels of signoff to any other release. More detail on the governance and assurance process will follow.

Product Board

That new item you’re adding top your roadmap — does it need to come to Product Board? If it hasn’t done so already please check.

Product Board is the place where we review major new roadmap items before committing to them. It’s a chance for you to socialise your plans with the wider NHS App team and get helpful input from product managers, UCD folk, technical architects and others. It’s also an important step in how we develop the NHS App roadmap.

Principles to bear in mind

• It is better to under-promise and over-deliver than the other way around.
• Map your dependencies. Cross-team dependencies are highly likely for data and analytics, notifications and messaging, and navigation and design. But what additional support do you need from NHS App teams, or other teams across NHS England?
• Raise your hand if you have doubts about something on the roadmap. We all know that things can change between agreeing to do a thing and actually doing it — decisions made several months ago can be revisited.
• Plans can change — they are not set in stone. We will formally review our plans for July to September at the end of June, but we should be reviewing them constantly.
• We are aiming for a balanced roadmap — a mixture of exploratory research, new features, continuous improvement and product debt — with time of course for unplanned work and interruptions. I wrote about this in more detail in a previous blog post about quarterly planning.