This weekend I jumped on the train to Cambridge where I attended the fifth NHS Hack Day. NHS Hack Days are weekend events that brings together doctors, nurses, developers, designers, and other “geeks who love the NHS” to create disruptive solutions to problems in the health space.

Having recetly moved and been told about LGBT specific healthcare serivces in my area, I had been wondering how easy this information was to find on nhs.uk. After a morning of testing, it became clear that not only was the information hard to find, but was also incredibly narrow minded. Searchable services in the LGBT section were unfortunately limited to Sexual Health Checks and Alcohol support.

Myself and another developer (Camille Baldock) racked our brains and came up with the idea of creating a webservice that integrates health centre data from foursquare, and the NHS Choices API. Users would be given the opportunity to add tags and descriptions to this data, thus allowing us to improve the data through crowdsourcing.

Our prototype generated some interest from the LGBT community and has given us cause to keep working on this idea on a project we are calling crowdhealth.io.