It sounds like a recipe for chaos right? But on the 3rd of July I joined just such a group for the day in Euston, London and marvelled as an array of ideas grew out of the collected intelligence.

The day started with a series of inspirational presentations (mhealthinnovationcamp.wordpress.com/agenda/) showcasing real-world mHealth innovations that are doing everything from helping collect & map scientific data to making healthcare services available to people with some of the greatest need in the world in developing territories.  

The event (mhealthinnovationcamp.wordpress.com/), organised and moderated by The Mobile Collective, was a fantastic example of crowd-sourcing and collective design. A free-form spirit organised around the principles of Open Spaces seemed anarchic at times, but quickly collated 20+ ideas from the audience for possible focus areas into 10 moderated groups each with a tight focus. Each group then spent time discussing within their focus area to identify a particular challenge within the focus area, ideas around the challenge, benefits from a possible solution and barriers/resolutions. 

The discussions were led using the Opens Spaces method which has 4 principles and one law.
- Whoever is in your group are always the right people.
- Whatever happens in your group is the right thing to happen
- The time it takes for your process to start is the right time
- When the process finishes is the right time to finish.
 
The law is that you can always vote with your feet - in other words everyone is free to move between groups as and when they wish.

Not every group got to the point of a clear proposal through this process. The group I was involved in seemed to suffer from some confusion around which challenge we actually wanted to solve (apparently the right thing to happen!). The process itself though was fascinating and resulted in some very interesting discussions along the way and raised ideas and concepts which in themselves were valuable.
 
At the end of the day the groups presented their ideas and results which included the following more concrete proposals:
 
The Butterfly Garden - a portal for open exchange of ideas and improvements in NHS
Change in Law - creating new possibilities for a public health service supported by open data
Home Angel - mobile services to support longer home stay for elderly patients
Innovation Hub in Africa - a plan to create physical and virtual spaces for promoting low-cost medical innovation in African countries
Mindpoint in Worldsuite - tracking mental health through mobile logging tools, an open source psychological health platform
Rainbow Button Initiative - a simple way of allowing patients to have control over sharing of their data
The Life Changer - using social media tools to influence positive behavioural changes (for example losing weight or quitting smoking) 
 
The day even produced a complete web tool for reporting and mapping possible outbreaks of e-coli infection - The Vomitometer ecoli.crowdmap.com/ - unfortunately(?) as there were very few outbreaks of e-coli in the UK the tool has been more of an exercise than a revolution.
 
At the Innovation in Healthcare expo earlier this year, the director of the NHS, Sir Bruce Keogh said that the NHS will solve its budget crisis through innovations that save money and increase efficiency. Events like the mHealth ThinkCamp are one way of bringing together cross disciplinary teams that can work together to identify and try and solve specific health issues. There is only so much that can be achieved in 8 hours, but there is a website underway collating the ideas from the day and providing a space for collaborators and teams to follow up their ideas and take them forward. New alliances were formed. Issues were raised and discussed in a positive environment with a view to problem solving and producing quick prototypes that could then be the basis for more extensive trials.

Sweden needs to create similar spaces for innovation in healthcare, bringing together front-line medical staff and IT-gurus/solution architects who can make stuff happen. This needs to happen alongside the large-scale infrastructure projects. Of course there need to be routines in place to evaluate and validate the resulting resources, but the pace of change needs to accelerate. As Sir Bruce Keogh said - "Once people who had an idea (in the NHS) said - and what we need it a million to make it happen. Now we need people to have ideas and say - and this will save us a million. 
 
Steve Cook
CEO 23 Gears Web Systems AB
www.23gears.se & www.patsim.se