What next for the NHS website syndication service?

Right now I’m working as a product manager in a team that supports others to re-use NHS website content and data in their own products and services.

We’ve just started a phase of research (discovery) and we’d like to talk to people who are already using the service, have signed up but never actually used it, or anyone who thinks they might be interested in using the service in the future.

If this sounds like you, here’s a little bit more about what we’re doing and why.

What is the NHS website syndication service?

Every month, millions of people consume NHS website content without even visiting the NHS website.

This is good. We want people to be able to find accurate, up to date, clinically-assured health information in whichever way is useful for them. If you’re searching for common health conditions via Google then you might see some of our content exposed in the search results in a ‘knowledge panel’ (you can read more about this work on the NHS Digital blog). If you ask a voice assistant to tell you about a symptom or medication, you might be given a snippet of advice from our website content.

At a local level, you might notice an A-Z listing of health conditions on your GP or council website. On the NHS App, our service data allows users to search for their local pharmacy before placing an order for a prescription.

Sharing our content for free in this way helps combat misinformation, gives us the best chance of making sure people are receiving the right health advice at the right time to reduce pressure on the NHS and could reduce the huge effort of content production and maintenance across the whole health and social care system.

Some people take our content by ‘scraping’ the website (a sort of automated copy+paste) under our Open Government Licence. Others use our APIs for a more stable link between their product and ours, or widgets if they don’t have access to the development skills required to use APIs. Interested organisations just need to sign up to our NHS Website Developer Portal to get started.

More recently, we’ve been modularising our content so that our APIs can supply smaller, more flexible chunks of information to support a greater range of platforms and technologies to use it. You can read more about our modularisation work in another NHS Digital blog.

Why are we doing some discovery work?

Our most recent annual survey of registered users indicated that people might be having trouble using the syndication service. Overall:

• the number of registered users who would not recommend our service increased to 14.7%
• the number of respondents who said they were ‘somewhat’ or ‘extremely’ dissatisfied’ with the service increased to 17.6%

There have also been other indicators, such as long waits to resolve support issues, which have led us to wonder whether we are providing a good service. Certainly, benchmarking ourselves using Lou Downe’s excellent 15 Principles of Good Service Design tool, we think there is room to improve.

We have some other questions too

As well as digging a little deeper into the low user satisfaction scores, we also want to find out more about some broader aspects of our service.

We want to learn more about our existing users: who is using the service now and what are their goals for doing so? Who visits our developer portal? Is it just developers? How easy is it to find and navigate our information?

We want to learn more about our APIs: which APIs are the most useful for our users? Where should future API development be focussed?

And we’d like to learn more about future opportunities for our flexible, modularised content: could we be doing more to support NHS organisations communicate with patients and citizens about their health? Is there a need for our content at all? Are there technical barriers we could help local organisations overcome?

Who we’d like to speak to

We’ll be getting in touch with some people directly, but we’d also really like to speak to:

• NHS organisations (comms, technical, programme or project teams) who are already using the syndication service to publish NHS website content or data on their own platforms. Or NHS organisations who don’t use the service but are interested in discussing how our content might help them. We’d also be interested in hearing from you if you registered with the service but don’t use any of our syndication products
• Developers working in charities, education, council, commercial or NHS settings who’d like to help us improve the experience of using our service and setting up APIs
• Commercial organisations, such as GP website suppliers, who either use our products now or who may in future. We’re keen to speak to people in a range of roles including product or project managers and developers or engineers
• Anyone else interested in finding out more about us and what we do!

Get in touch

You can contact me via DM or Twitter @alisoncwarren or by emailing the team at syndication.service@nhs.net