A Guide to Apps for the Public and Professionals

Healthier Lancashire and South Cumbria, including Lancashire County Council and Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council have partnered with us to offer a validated selection of health and care apps for the public and professionals.

Since there are an estimated 170,000 apps in health and care, it is impossible for members of the public or care professionals to know which are safe and valuable to use and recommend without an independent assessment. To this end, we carry out a rigorous 118-point review process and present the results in clear, searchable web content with rankings.

Dr Amanda Thornton, Clinical Director of Lancashire Care Foundation Trust and a digital champion comments:

‘We’re excited to be working with ORCHA to give citizens and clinicians more confidence in considering what health apps are out there to look after themselves. Clinicians can know what risks and value are attached to these apps and recommend ones if, say, their patient wants to eat well, exercise more or manage their diabetes. We will be building particular apps into our pathways, for example, people waiting for a rheumatology appointment might be recommended a pain management app, so that when they come to the clinic they’ve started thinking about managing their pain. They can share the information with the clinician and collaboratively consider the history of the previous months and decide on the best outcomes and support plan.’

We make the results of our reviews public on our website, but the advantages to the NHS and councils in partnering with us are:

• Clinicians and care professionals can login and issue a recommendation to their patient/client that generates a personalised link for downloading the app. by text message or email.
• The person can then read about and download the app, and will soon be able to leave feedback about it. • Dashboard management information is available about numbers of recommendations, click-throughs, etc. • The site can be ‘white-labelled’ with the local public sector organisations’ branding.
• For more details on our partner site, please visit https://lancashire.orcha.co.uk

Read the full briefing: “Effective use of national information sources”