Innovative NZ Product Wins UK Award

Innovative NZ Product Wins UK Award

Developers of groundbreaking software, which helps make and track ethical decisions in the health and social care sectors have scooped a major software award in the UK.

The Values Exchange, owned by VIDe Ltd and developed by Professor David Seedhouse, has won a top prize at the Health Service Journal (HSJ) Awards in the ‘Improving Healthcare with E-technology’ category.

Judges say the Values Exchange was selected for its distinguished and innovative use of information technology (IT) to develop an electronic forum for canvassing views for the delivery of healthcare. There were almost 1,000 entries across the award’s 18 categories.

The Values Exchange enables people to put forward their opinions, preferences and moral reasoning via a web based tool, and provides democratic debate, and a paper trail on topics of professional and personal concern. The Values Exchange uses a unique single-framework questionnaire which automatically plots and compares values trends, highlighting both difference and consensus across different health and social groups.

The South Staffordshire NHS Trust in the UK installed the system last year and Professor Seedhouse says it is already providing effective decision making assistance to staff on issues such as whether a patient should be denied access to certain areas of their home for safety reasons; whether medicines should be disguised if a patient is reluctant to take them, and whether staff should restrict a patient’s smoking.

Professor Seedhouse says the Values Exchange system has also played a pivotal role in at least two life threatening cases where patient safety was at stake.

The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology was an investor in the research and development of the software, through its Grants for Private Sector Research and Development (GPSRD) and its Technology for Business Growth (TBG) schemes.

The awards are designed to give products international recognition and to identify, celebrate and share good practice in the health and social care sector, with winners entitled to use the HSJ winners’ logo to signal their achievement.

“Winning this award will be significant when negotiating new contracts. But more importantly, it helps put values-based decision making on the map.

“In the end, all decisions are based on human values, yet we wrongly think ‘the evidence’ and technical expertise is decisive,” says Professor Seedhouse.

The company is already close to signing several new UK and Australian contracts. One new customer is Staffordshire University, where every new student will be required to use the Values Exchange system as part of their induction, and will be encouraged to trade views on issues and proposals that will shape the future of the institution.

ENDS

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