More and more NHS organisations are using Gooroo Planner, so we’re in a great position to invest heavily in making our software even better than before. Here’s a preview of what’s coming out in the next few months:

Integrated reporting

Currently you navigate around the main Report area using a menu of links. It’s easy to use, but we think it could be a lot better. So we’re going to turn it into a tabbed area that you can navigate around freely, without having to reload the main reporting table every time, or reselect services when editing or drilling down to week-by-week profiles.

Export to Excel

Sometimes you just want your main reports table on paper, or in a table that you can paste into a document. You can do that already, by dragging the mouse across the report table and then copying and pasting it. But that’s a little clumsy, so we’re going to build you an export to Excel button. It will download your whole report into a single Excel table, with all your formatting, sorting, filtering and subtotalling preserved. Then you can easily copy, paste, and print it from there.

Advanced filtering

A lot of people have asked for this, and here it comes. The main report table already has a simple but effective filter box, that narrows your table down to whatever you type in it. The trouble is that sometimes you get matches you don’t need, so if you type “ENT” then you’ll get the specialty, but those letters also appear in “inpatient” so you might get a lot else as well.

The solution will be an advanced filter that lets you choose exactly what you want to see, header by header. So if you want to see both of the specialties ENT and ophthalmology, and only daycases for each, then that’s exactly what you’ll get.

Video tutorials

Instruction manuals are so last century; today, you want bite-sized videos just a few minutes long to show you how to do things. Video is especially good for software tutorials, because it shows you exactly what happens, in context, without you having to wade through pages and pages of screenshots.

Unfortunately nearly all NHS organisations block YouTube (though even the Department of Health has a channel there), as well as other video-sharing, slideshow-sharing, and file-sharing sites. In fact, some NHS organisations automatically block any site that contains streaming video. Dear IT departments: is this really necessary? We’re trying to get some work done here.

Anyway, we’re determined to get video tutorials to you somehow, and here’s how we plan to do it.

First we’re going to set up a new subdomain (video.gooroo.co.uk), and put all our video tutorials on there. So even if your organisation does automatically detect and block video streaming sites, only that subdomain should be affected. Then, because all the content is serious and work-related, you should find it easy to persuade your IT department to unblock it again. Look: no funny cat videos.

Secondly, in case that doesn’t work for everyone, we’ll be able to deliver those videos to your smartphone. This is a bigger task because we’ll have to rebuild much of our website onto a new platform that responds automatically to mobile screen sizes. But then at least you can be sure of accessing the videos somehow.