SOARing

Significant Highlights

SOAR inhouse development

2018 / 2019 is the first year that NES took on maintenance and development of SOAR inhouse. Although we had an SLA (Service Level Agreement) in place with our external developers, we managed all development work without invoking their services. Following a thorough review of the team’s new capacity, a decision was made to cease the renewal of our Service Level Agreement with our external provider at the end of March 2019. All SOAR maintenance and further development will now be undertaken by the NES inhouse team. A note of all development efforts can be found on the Medical Appraisal Scotland website once they have been deployed.

www.appraisal.nes.scot.nhs.uk/help-me-with/soar/about-soar/deployhistory.aspx

Some of the development highlights:

CPD Log change where users can now carry ongoing CPD items into future appraisals
A site-wide Autosave function was developed and users can opt in to use this if they choose
RoT changes were made to help DMEs and EOs more easily identify Trainers who require continued recognition
The PDP function now includes options for Completed, Discontinued, and Progressing; depending on which status you assign, these will be carried forward (or not) into the next appraisal
SOAR’s web hosting provider changed over to the Azure platform at the end of March 2019.

Webhosting: Microsoft Azure

We successfully changed SOAR’s webhosting over to the Azure platform. The move was completed in March 2019 and has introduced overall cost savings as well as improved efficiency. The new hosting platform has laid the foundation which will help with future SOAR improvements, such as enhanced login features, and improved connectivity to other NES IT systems on the Turas platform. Plans are still in place to overhaul SOAR’s coding behind-the-scenes so that we are able to make use of some of the new infrastructure, but rather than a massive project in one go, we will be looking to do this section by section as we work on new development projects.

Moving Technology

One of the struggles the development teams have had over the years is the challenge of building an online system to cater for older, even obsolete, systems which are still in use in some NHS premises.

Technology moves at such a pace that it is difficult for some NHS IT colleagues to update the local hardware and software to catch up with the latest developments. In line with the “NHS Scotland ICT Infrastructure Standard and 2021 Operating Model” however, we have gradually raised the minimum browser requirements depending on Microsoft’s continued support of their operating systems and browsers.

Microsoft web browsers (Internet Explorer and Edge) are still the default browser in most NHS offices, but globally they only make up 4.9% of all browsers used in 2018 / 2019. According to StatCounter.com, Google Chrome makes up 60% in the same time period; with Safari, a web browser mainly associated with Apple devices, making up 15%.

Whilst we will continue to support our users to the best of our abilities, we will no longer develop SOAR to work with older unsupported systems and browsers.

We simply do not have the resources for this, and continued support for obsolete browsers is not good practice in IT security.

Review of MSF Options

SOAR continues the provision of MSF via our 3rd party provider, WASP Software. This arrangement has been extended through to the end of March 2020, covering the 2019 / 2020 period. The longer-term plan of a multi-disciplinary one-MSF tool is still being discussed. Until that is finalised, NES will continue to provide MSF via WASP Software.

Supporting SOAR Users

During 2018 / 2019, the SOAR helpdesk resolved 6457 enquiries¹ – 438 less compared to the year before.

Of the queries we dealt with, nearly half (47%) were from Secondary Care users (Consultants and Secondary Care Admin teams); a quarter (25%) were from Primary Care users (including Admin teams); Trainee queries came to 15%; and queries from MSF Raters, Pharmacists, Receptionists, GP Practice Managers, and DMEs (Directors of Medical Education), EOs (Educational Organisations) and Others make up the rest (13%).

A quarter of our overall queries this year related to MSF (1623 / 25%), mostly requests to repeat their MSF in preparation for their next Revalidation. 1130 tickets revolved around helping users log in to SOAR (18%); which is a slight increase (3%) from last year. 1005 tickets (16%) were requests to help correct appraisal details (usually a change in appraisal date, or appraisal periods).

SOAR Helpdesk Queries

1. Helpdesk figures above taken from Zendesk

Following last year’s decision to drop the live SOAR demo sessions, video tutorials were created in their place. Two videos were created: one for Appraisers and Appraisees covering the appraisal process on SOAR in a step-by-step guide; the other was an overview for local Health Board Admin teams to go over some of the key admin tasks and functions of SOAR.

The video tutorials can be found on the Medical Appraisal Scotland website.

SOAR team changes

In August, after 4 ½ years with the SOAR team, Alistair Bryan joined the wider NES Digital team working within the Data Warehouse team. Alistair is hardworking and an important part of the team and will be a tremendous asset to NES Digital. We wish Alistair the best of luck in this new step in his career.

Following William Liu’s appointment back to the Medical Appraisal team, the previous NES Digital role of Senior Information Analyst was relinquished with the acknowledgement that William will carry forward the management responsibilities for SOAR in the role of Training Manager.

Michael Teasdale’s contract has been renewed with NES Digital and he continues to provide technical expertise and support in the continued further development of SOAR.

Future projects and Impacts

Appraiser Training Course Applications

As mentioned in the Plans for 2019 / 2020 section, we are looking to integrate the existing training course application process into SOAR.

Initial talks are progressing to see if we can utilise the Turas Learn platform in the first instance (to avoid duplication of system functions). It will be a significant project, but we are hoping to prioritise this due to the multiple advantages and positive impact going forward.

SOAR Helpdesk

The previously proposed change in SOAR’s helpdesk support software remains in the pipeline. However, rather than moving to ServiceNow, a decision was made to switch our helpdesk provider to Jira. This has been implemented within NES for internal use, and we hope to pick up on this in early 2019 / 2020.

From a user’s point of view, there should be no change or impact on them. All SOAR queries will continue to be sent to SOAR@nes.scot.nhs.uk and they will be picked up and actioned as per normal.

Multi-Disciplines on SOAR?

We reported last year of increased interest from non-medical colleagues in the use of SOAR for their appraisal process (e.g. dental, public health etc). Due to team changes and resources, this was not carried out in 2018 / 2019.

Given the change in priorities, this is unlikely to be addressed in 2019 / 2020 although the situation may change depending on progress and resources. We will keep colleagues updated on the progress of this, if and as it happens.

SOAR News Alert categories

Following the rollout of GDPR last year, we introduced “categories” of News Alerts sent out via SOAR. All messages are now tagged in a category which users are invited to opt-in to. Users will only receive relevant email notifications if they have opted in to these categories:

Local Health Board Updates
Appraisal and Revalidation
NES run Events
Non-NES run Events
Other

We have received some feedback from users stating that they had not been informed of certain notifications. To avoid missing out on crucial updates, we advise users to opt-in to all categories. But as a minimum: We strongly recommend users opt-in to "Local Health Board Update" messages so that you are notified when your Health Board Admins circulate any important messages. Additionally, Appraisers are asked to opt-in to the NES-run events so that you are kept informed about the Annual Scottish Medical Appraisers Conference.