The No Duff projects foundry - our R&D space where we develop the tools for supporting veterans and products that we can market to generate an income to help veterans.

The projects are very much beta works - dont expect them to be smooth experiences. We keep them open so that people can comment, contribute or just keep up to date with where we are going.

When something gets past the conceptual, initial design or commercial in confidence stages it will be up here and accessable. Otherwise you will see the link disabled.

The big projects at the moment, besides the courses, are the standing orders project and the virtual clinic. The two are related pieces of work and are well under way. They dovetail into the third peice of work, the data project.

The standing orders project is a suite of standing orders and the associated related documentation for small health providers. It grew out of a project I ran for a Gp practice I work at. We wanted standing orders but could not find anything suitable online - we were even willing to pay and couldn’t find some. So we set about writing our own - sound familiar?

It then dawned on us that every practice, rest home and other health provider in the country faced the same issue. Thousands of small businesses reinventing the wheel. At No Duff we intend to be financially independent, no more rattling the tin and hoping for a handout or having agencies and organisations attempt to buy us off with grants. So we set about wrapping this up into a commercial product - which is this project.

There are a number of sets of standing orders being developed. The first off the rank will be for primary care - because that is what we need for our virtual clinic. The second will be for managing fracture clinics in primary care. The third is for residential care - because we will be providing residential care in the not too distant future.

Another project we have past the planning stage is the virtual veterans clinic. Its hard to find medical providers whom understand veterans and their health. We are looking at the feasability of a national virtual medical practice specifically for veterans and the funding model that would support that. We already know its possible to enroll patients into our virtual clinic. What we are now working out is how we link with the providers of those whom already have a Gp.

We have have tried and tested virtual consultations for patients through our clinical partner and are happy we have ways of dealing with the issues. It does mean a substantial investment at the clinic end in both hardware and software to make this happen. All going well we will have a state of the art virtual practice up and running by mid year - so watch this space.

As part of the virtual clinic there will be a portal which enables remote care - we are working with a provider whom has huge experience in working with military medical information and the issues that brings to provide this. We expect the portal will go live at the same time we open the virtual clinic to enrolments and consultations.

This year we will also kick off the data project. That project is collecting information about veterans and their outcomes and loading it into a big graph database so that we can start to get some big data analytics going. We are looking to lever the advances in big data and AI to change outcomes. It will certainly inform the advocacy for support for veterans in the future.

Being truly paranoid individuals ourselves the privacy model is unlike any other we have seen - its all controllable by the veteran down to the individual entries for who can see things and what can be done with the data.

As you have probably noticed our projects dovetail together. We have the courses to raise, train and sustain a frontline mental health workforce to support veterans and also provide knowledge and skills for the veterans to support themselves. We have an app to enhance the efficacy of our frontline support operations. We are developing standing orders to fund our operations - but these will also to work for our virtual clinic and the front line providers. We have a comprehensive data project which will provide the information to inform what we do in the courses and clinic as well as at a national advocacy level.

Think of it in terms of combined arms operations.