The Pharmacy Code4Health community seeks to generate innovation and opportunities at the intersection of healthcare, pharmacy expertise and digital technology. The use of medicines and information about medicines are the most common health care interventions in the NHS and digital technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives; this is an opportunity for pharmacy community to help create the digital health care future The Pharmacy Code4Health Community will:

• Establish a specialised pharmacy community of clinicians, users and technology experts with an interest in innovation, problem solving and open source wherever medicines or medicines information is used
• Educate, train and connect a community of interest to innovate, build, assure and spread solutions that solve problems for patients or users using pharmacy related services
• Inspire the pharmacy workforce to engage, collaborate and develop innovative digital solutions
• Mentor and support talent
• Help incubate and grow novel open source solutions
• Run innovation multichannel events, community challenge prizes, community development awards and hackathons
• Support the development and delivery of identified open source solutions
• Identify, support and facilitate conversion of proprietary pharmacy solutions to open source solutions.
• Stimulate innovation for pharmacy and medicines information systems not limited to existing providers
• Run direct challenges supporting innovation around pharmacy and medicines care
• Supporting other Not for Profit organisations including NHS organisations
• Promote and engage with the pharmacy sector using multiple channels including workshops, events, WebEx and social media tools.

This strategy directly empowers pharmacy stakeholders and communities of interest to own and plan the roadmap of Open Source solutions without the reliance on proprietary vendors and lengthy locked-in licence contracts. This approach will also seek to demonstrate the ‘art of the possible’ with innovative solutions that can be delivered in an agile and timely manner.

You can join with like minded people in our communities, learn to code (write software), explore the resources in the emerging open health and care ecosystem, build apps and test your ideas.

Who is it for:

The Pharmacy Code4Health community is for anyone engaged in pharmacy in any sector, including registered pharmacy professionals, undergraduates, preregistration students, developers, coders, technophiles of any expertise or non - your passion and creativity will help bring diversity to the community.

The only thing we ask for is that you have a genuine interest in medicines, the information and data to support better health care and the art of the possible using digital technology.

In 2016, we will aim to introduce and begin to grow the Pharmacy Code4Health Community, so why not come join the discussion here and come along to our events to meet with leading clinical developers, design and build solutions to your everyday healthcare problems?