Improving the way we work with NHS Choices (part 3)

It's been a while since we last blogged about how we share stories and responses with NHS Choices so it is time for another update.

When we blogged about alerting you to new posts coming from NHS Choices, we had a to give a caveat:

Your alert will only work if it relates to a location which is recognised on NHS Choices. This normally means that alerts about NHS trusts and hospitals are OK, but specific departments within a hospital won't work.

We're happy to report that this caveat is no longer necessary.

Each night we ask NHS Choices for the stories and responses they've published that day so that we can show them on Patient Opinion. We also send our stories and responses to NHS Choices as we publish them, so they can display ours too.

Until now, we've only been able to link incoming stories to locations, such as hospitals, but not to a specific department within the location. But it turns out that sometimes story authors do add some department information to their story, and we can capture that in the data we receive.

So now, when we import stories from NHS Choices, we now look for department information. If we find it, we work out what we think that translates to on Patient Opinion. And once we know the kind of thing we're looking for, we simply check the services we list on Patient Opinion and link to the one that provides that function. If we can't find one, we link the story at the location (hospital) level as we did before.

Are there any limitations?

At this stage, we're getting a 65-70% success rate for linking NHS Choices stories to more specific services. There are a number of reasons why we might not be able to link to a specific service:

1. The author might not have chosen a department on NHS Choices
2. We might not understand what the department type means
3. We might not list a service that matches
4. We might list more than one service which could match

As we develop this further, we'll aim to improve our success rate a bit more by addressing each of these issues. We’re sure we can do better!

How do you benefit?

The result of all this data-wrangling is that, for about two-thirds of incoming stories, we can link the story to the specific service it relates to. And that makes all the difference, because it means that all the great features of Patient Opinion, such as searching, alerting, reporting and visualisations, work even better for you.

For example, incoming NHS Choices stories about maternity services will start appearing (as they should) in searches for "services which provide maternity care". And if you want to be alerted to all stories about your maternity service, whether they are posted via Patient Opinion or NHS Choices, you can. Lovely!