Department of Health chooses dxw for digital transformation

The Department of Health (DoH) has chosen dxw to drive forward its digital transformation project, enabling staff to be more productive and save costs on a daily basis.

The agreement includes a new intranet for the DoH's 2000 staff to access and publish information online, plus a website to help health workers access the services they need with greater satisfaction.

Additionally, xdxw will allow the DoH to make significant efficiency savings via open source infrastructure including WordPress, which it used to build the company's website, integrating it with the necessary backend systems.

"[The DoH] found that simply saving each member of staff 30 minutes per week equates to over 1 million of efficiency savings per year, so as well as making life easier for users we are helping to make the healthcare budget go further something which will benefit all of us as taxpayers and healthcare users," Harry Metcalfe, managing director of dxw, said.

dxw, a G-Cloud provider to many other public sector organisations including NHS England and the Health Research Authority, used an agile process to roll out the changes in the most efficient way possible. The code will be published on GitHub, allowing other organisations to learn from the roll out.

"We redesigned our intranet two years ago but even though it is cheaper to run than its predecessor with higher user satisfaction, user feedback and analytic data show that there is still room for improvement," said Chris Fleming, intranet product manager at the Department of Health.

"Users would like to find things more easily and content owners and editors want a more streamlined publication process. One of the key lessons we learned from the initial redesign was that you can never do enough engagement, so together with dxw we are regularly talking to users to understand and address their needs."

Clare Hopping
Freelance writer

Clare is the founder of Blue Cactus Digital, a digital marketing company that helps ethical and sustainability-focused businesses grow their customer base.

Prior to becoming a marketer, Clare was a journalist, working at a range of mobile device-focused outlets including Know Your Mobile before moving into freelance life.

As a freelance writer, she drew on her expertise in mobility to write features and guides for ITPro, as well as regularly writing news stories on a wide range of topics.