We provide accessible, inclusive services 

In 2008 we took on NHS Choices, the Department of Health’s information website. Our mission: develop it into the health service’s digital front door for England – helping to take pressure off front-line services, while also reducing costs.

What we’ve done

The contract was about much more than improving efficiency. We’ve helped to introduce initiatives that bring real benefits to the community. Just three examples:

Pregnancy planner: The NHS Choices pregnancy planner is an app that brings expectant mothers weekly pregnancy information and advice, right on their desktop. Instead of searching through reams of pregnancy information online, they simply key in their due date: they then have 24/7 access to pregnancy advice relevant to their week of pregnancy. In its first 13 months, over 40,000 pregnant women downloaded it – so it was helping 6% of the pregnant population to plan their health and wellbeing better.

UK Online: Not everyone has access to the internet. So we’ve been working with UK Online centres to give the digitally and socially excluded online health information – and training on how to use the internet. Over the past 18 months we’ve partnered with nine 'champion' centres to promote NHS health information to all their clients. The project has helped people who’ve never used the internet before to get health information, find local NHS services and manage their health conditions.

Facebook Healthy Living: Facebook gives us another channel for reaching people and motivating them to lead healthier lives. We set up and run the Healthy Living community, providing advice and support to users while promoting NHS Choices' Live Well content, tools and videos. The page hosts a health ‘goal setter’ app which lets users set health goals and receive motivational messages to help them hit their targets. It’s still early days, but just over four weeks from launch we’d attracted 14,500 users, leading to 43,152 page views.

What we’ve achieved

• We were set a target of 7m visits a month by 2011. By sharply expanding the website’s usefulness, we hit our target two years early.
• We’re helping 7m people a month to make informed decisions about their health
• We’ve helped NHS Trusts by providing syndicated content for their local sites
• And we’ve made the communication two-way. Users can now add comments to the site, sharing their experience of health services (and their ratings) with other users. In turn, this is encouraging hospitals to make service improvements.