Hi, I’m Paul 👋. I live in Yorkshire, UK and love to ski, surf and hike. I’m a problem solver at heart and founder and CEO at 6B. I’m striving to carve my own path in business and life. Follow me on X and LinkedIn. More about me → What I’m doing now →
For many years, digital transformation in the NHS has often been framed around projects. A new system. A new portal. A new app. A new integration. A new programme with a defined budget, a delivery milestone and a target end date. Projects matter. They give structure to investment, create focus, and help organisations move from intention to action. Without them, very little would get delivered. But…
A shift from tools to collaborators Agentic AI changes software engineering workflows. It introduces systems that can interpret intent, plan a sequence of actions, use multiple tools, adapt to feedback, and continue making progress towards a defined outcome. From the perspective of a technologist, this is a structural change in how engineering work is organised, executed and improved. What makes…
The start of a new year always brings a moment of pause. In the NHS, that pause is rarely quiet - but it is increasingly purposeful. Over the past decade, digital in healthcare has often been characterised by acceleration without alignment. We’ve delivered remarkable innovation in pockets, but too often at the cost of fragmentation, technical debt, and exhausted teams trying to hold it all…
Digital transformation has long been a central aim for the NHS - and while progress has sometimes felt slow, there are compelling examples of impactful innovation emerging across the service. By learning from these success stories, the NHS can accelerate progress, inspire local adoption of proven digital models, and build more resilient, patient-centred care systems. From Pilot to Practice:…
The role of software engineering is undergoing a major shift, driven by rapid developments in artificial intelligence. It is an exciting time for engineers, offering a chance to redefine roles and significantly boost contributions to meaningful innovation. In many companies today, software development typically includes writing code, debugging issues, rigorous testing, and careful deployment.…
Achieving seamless interoperability in healthcare systems remains a formidable challenge for the NHS. As the healthcare sector increasingly relies on interconnected systems to provide efficient, patient-centered care, standards like HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) and openEHR have emerged as pivotal frameworks. While distinct in their approaches, these standards complement…
As healthcare systems evolve, the need for effective information sharing between various care settings, organisations, and geographies has become increasingly apparent. In the NHS, this need is crucial for optimising patient outcomes and ensuring high-quality care. The drive toward interoperability - the seamless exchange of information between different IT systems across healthcare - plays a…
The use of Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) in NHS Trusts across England is both complex and varied, reflecting the unique needs and preferences of different healthcare settings. To get a clearer picture, I researched the EPR systems currently in use across all 214 NHS Trusts in England. Here are the key findings and what they mean for the future of healthcare IT in England. Leading EPR Systems…
In a fast-paced software development landscape, driving a healthy engineering culture is really important. A positive engineering culture improves collaboration and innovation, it improves the quality of the delivered outcome, it plays a pivotal role in attracting and retaining top talent, and it makes work more fun and enjoyable for everyone involved. Culture is not a ‘one and done’ activity, it…
In healthcare patient data is paramount and lives are at stake, efficient data sharing and communication are crucial. The concept of interoperability, specifically semantic interoperability, has emerged as a key driver in revolutionising healthcare by ensuring that information can flow seamlessly between different systems and healthcare providers. There is a significance of semantic…
The NHS Architecture Principles for digital services serve as a guide for technical architects and service designers, ensuring that the digital infrastructure supporting any new NHS digital service is not only effective but also sustainable, interoperable, and user-centric. There are 10 key NHS Architecture Principles that need to be considered with each new implementation: 1. Delivering…
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NHS in England has undergone a significant digital transformation that would typically take years to achieve. This digital acceleration has paved the way for a more resilient and patient-centric healthcare system and it has been guided by NHS England’s What Good Looks Like (WGLL) framework - a roadmap designed to shape the future of healthcare…
In recent years, collaboration between healthcare providers has become a priority. The NHS, underpinned by the Long Term Plan, emphasises the need for local health and care organisations to work together operationally and strategically. One crucial aspect of this collaboration is sharing data effectively across different care settings. Interoperability, the ability to make IT systems work together…
Interoperability in primary care can be tricky to navigate, particularly because there are lots of clinical systems in play and lots of paths to take to interface. In this article I am going to look into interoperability with the three ‘principle’ clinical IT systems used by GPs in the UK Vision, EMIS and SystmOne, exploring routes to interface, standards and assessments, network access and…
Interoperability is the ability of health information systems to work together within and across different organisations to advance the effective delivery of healthcare for individuals and communities. Interoperability in healthcare is basically about getting healthcare systems to talk to one another: Disparate software exchanging data between a range of sources including hospitals, GP’s,…
The opportunity for AI in healthcare is an area I am both optimistic and passionate about. Healthcare has always faced significant challenges, and AI solutions have the potential to do more to help healthcare. So we need to focus on it, the potential benefits to patients, healthcare professionals and the overall health ecosystem are enormous, now more-so than ever: Healthcare systems are under…
Web3 technology provides increased data security, scalability, and privacy for users, whilst combating the influence of large technology companies. Web3 is (in the most part) over 10 years old, but it is still early days in many ways. The general ambition for web3 is to ‘decentralise everything’. Web1 (initially) was fully decentralised and web2 centralised everything into platforms, so the hope…
A Week in My Life: Paul Brown, MD, 6B
If you want to achieve something great, you have to work hard. But working hard for a sustained period of time is complicated, it is a dynamic balance between putting in a lot of hours and maintaining effectiveness - put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. The trick to working hard for a sustained time is really to set clearly defined goals, and hold…
Too many businesses place too much control with the employer, and not enough with employees. This is especially true when it comes to managing fundamentals, such as people’s time. But if we’re part of something we really believe in, we should be trusted to manage our energy and our time. To do our best work, we need to balance work and rest, and sometimes, the most effective thing to…