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Thiscovery is an online platform developed by THIS Institute, where people who have questions about health and care can connect with people who can help with the answers.
Thiscovery provides the capability to understand problems, gather evidence, build shared visions, co-design solutions, and evaluate them at scale.
THIS Institute
The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute, known as THIS Institute, is based at the University of Cambridge and is funded by the Health Foundation. THIS Institute works closely with NHS patients and staff, and diverse stakeholders including policymakers, regulators, and academics to improve the evidence base for improving quality and safety in healthcare.
THIS Institute is based on the principle that improving quality and safety in healthcare requires the expertise and views of people who use and work in services. The Institute has identified a pressing need for participatory, engaging, accessible and inclusive ways of designing and testing solutions at scale from the start, and with rigour. But setting up such projects from scratch every time can be expensive, burdensome and time-consuming. It can also be hard for those seeking to innovate in services to find the right expertise to learn from, whether that’s the lived experience of patients or the professional expertise and experience of staff. And it can be hard for people who would like to contribute to healthcare improvement and innovation to find opportunities and get involved.
Creating a solution
One solution to these problems is Thiscovery. Thiscovery provides the capability to understand problems, gather evidence, build shared visions, co-design solutions, and evaluate them at scale. It provides a mechanism to engage large, diverse crowds of people across geographies, at speed, and with rigour to deliver actionable insights for real world change.
Thiscovery’s offering
Thiscovery offers questionnaires, interviews, consensus-building and other tools, alongside real time access to project data. For participants, Thiscovery makes contributing their experiences and views to research projects easy and convenient, with short, engaging tasks. Importantly, it promotes inclusion and diversity by enabling consultation and engagement without having to bring people together in one physical location. By expanding how patients, staff, and other stakeholders can help to improve and innovate in health and care, Thiscovery enables actionable and relevant findings based on real-life experience and expertise, ultimately strengthening the evidence base for implementing positive changes in health and care settings.
The future
Following support from Cambridge Enterprise, Thiscovery has been used in numerous consultancy projects, including the co-design of new approaches for improving the safety of maternity care. It is hoped that, as a result of these activities, all children born in the UK within the next few years will have a safer passage into the world. The potential for making real differences to people’s lives is right there in Thiscovery.
All images courtesy of Thiscovery
Annual Review 2022
This impact story was first published in the Cambridge Enterprise Annual Review 2022.
View our Annual Review 2022 to learn more about some of the exciting breakthroughs and innovations that we have been part of during 2021-2022.