ORCHA (the Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps) has been helping healthcare professionals and the public find trusted health apps since 2015, through its digital health libraries.
Following the rapid growth of the digital health sector, healthcare professionals and citizens now have distinct and different needs from their health app libraries – and so ORCHA has created products exactly tailored for each of these two audiences.
The UK’s first Digital Health Formulary
Nearly 75 years after the publication of the first British National Formulary (BNF), the essential prescribing tool depended upon by all healthcare professionals, the UK’s first Digital Health Formulary sets up a system for prescribing safe health apps to patients.
GP Tom Micklewright, ORCHA’s medical director, said:
“The original BNF was introduced because in the first half of the 20th century doctors were faced with an increasingly complex range of drugs and influential pharmaceutical industry. They realised they needed high-quality and independent advice. We are in the same situation again now, as pressures on our healthcare systems make us look at revolutionary new ways of doing things.”
The new formulary can be integrated into existing patient record systems, such as CERNER or EPIC dashboards. It’s a single source from which to find health apps which have been pre-selected and vetted by healthcare colleagues.
Within three clicks, healthcare professionals can send a health app recommendation to a patient via a secure text or email. Recommendations and patient downloads can be tracked, ensuring good governance. The healthcare provider can also take an overview, monitoring how many apps it is prescribing and which are being downloaded and used by patients.
A safe health app library for citizens
Consumer research* has indicated that 62% of people are interested in using apps and many are finding them themselves rather than through a healthcare professional (55% had received their recommendation from a healthcare professional). This raises serious concerns about quality, as only 20% of the 320,000 health apps currently available are safe to use.**
From now, ORCHA will be developing straightforward, easy-to-use Health App Libraries in partnership with healthcare providers, which allow patients to easily find apps they can use unaided. Only consumer-friendly, over-the-counter apps which require no input from a healthcare professionals will be included on these libraries.
The App Libraries are structured on simple, pre-built layouts. They can be presented in several languages and configurations and designed to support health strategies and key health priorities of each health care provider. The Libraries can only be accessed within the geographical territory of the healthcare providers, ensuring that all the regulations for that territory area met safely and that data governance and residency requirements are met.
The reporting dashboard will enable the provider to have new population insights.
Tom Micklewright said:
“We want to get safe digital health to those who need it as safely and quickly as possible, so we’ve designed the Libraries with usability and accessibility as an absolute priority. We’re proud that our Libraries are rated AA for web content accessibility. They’re modern, responsive, and mobile first.”
These two new products are part of an expansive range of ORCHA products designed to give health and care providers everything they need to deliver digital health safely.
See a video about the new ORCHA products here.
* https://info.orchahealth.com/digital-health-attitudes-behaviours-2022-report
**ORCHA statistics
Researchers at ORCHA and the University of Warwick have identified that digital health products such as health apps could make a substantial contribution to tackling NHS urgent care pressures, by keeping patients out of hospital in the first place.
Both the NHS Confederation and Secretary of State for Health, Steve Barclay, have said that tackling preventable admissions should be a key strand of a new approach to urgent and emergency care – and that up to 20% of hospital admissions are avoidable with the right care in place.
The research team created a budget impact model which examined long-term conditions, acknowledging that these are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to NHS pressures. Even so, they found that digital health tools, if deployed across primary care, could reduce pressure on the NHS and prevent annual attendances in:
By removing these pressures, each year the NHS could gain 106,000 surgical procedures in secondary care and the avoided GP appointments are the equivalent of recruiting 590 more GPs – a good move towards the target 5,000 more needed.
These avoided attendances would save the NHS around £553m annually.
Dr Simon Leigh, research director at ORCHA, said:
“Our budget impact model has shown how so much more can be achieved by innovative thinking. Because we simply can’t go on assuming that if we keep doing the same thing, something different will happen (Einstein’s definition of insanity). Digital health products can be used by thousands of people at the same time. No doctor could achieve this, especially when the number of doctors we have is decreasing in the first place.”
Along with these big-picture statistics, ORCHA’s new report, Reducing urgent care pressures with digital health, offers illustrations to show how individual digital health products can be deployed as strategic preventative measures.
Commenting on the report, founding CEO of ORCHA, Liz Ashall-Payne, who presented to the House of Commons Select Committee on digital health last month, said:
“Low complexity digital health tools which require no interoperability with NHS systems can be used extremely effectively in preventative care. Our research team has shown how much of an impact this could make. At ORCHA we are clinicians and allied health professionals first and foremost, and everything we do is grounded in evidence. We hope that our new report will help health policy makers recognise the game-changing potential digital health offers the NHS.”
As Steve Brine MP, and Chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee, observes “The NHS is one of the most important subjects around at the moment.”
Digital health can help address NHS pressures, including those seen in urgent and elective care, and so we are especially proud and encouraged that ORCHA was invited as a Witness to speak at the Health and Social Care Select Committee, as it looked to assess the progress made to achieve a digitally enabled health system across the NHS.
ORCHA was invited, together with Diabetes UK and Cystic Fibrosis Trust, to discuss the steps that will help the NHS to accelerate its digital transformation.
Our thoughts on this subject include:
The majority of people in the UK agree that it was vital we all look at new ways to manage our health, including using high-quality digital health apps. 62% of people in the UK agree with this, of which 41% strongly agree.
Amongst people who have used a health app, satisfaction is very high. Overall, 85% of people who have used a health app are satisfied with it, with 36% of those being very satisfied.
But, although there is advocacy amongst the majority for digital health to support their mental health, when asked, the public does have concerns that should be addressed. These include clinical efficacy, data security and financial.
These concerns are well placed. ORCHA has assessed 23,000 health apps against 350+ criteria across Clinical/Professional Assurance, Data & Privacy, and Usability & Accessibility. Only 20% meet quality thresholds.
The NHS is a heavily governed sector; we expect policy and process, to assure that the right decisions are being made for patient safety. The controlled stages of assessment, education and distribution have long been in place for medicine.
Digital health technologies bring significant benefit, but can also bring risk. A product not fit for purpose can affect a person’s physical or mental health, arising from the operation of the product itself, such as inaccurate diagnosis, unsafe treatment delivery, or incorrect guidance.
Key take aways:
Considering this, as discussed today, we recommend that the committee considers:
To watch the discussion: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/83689477-cb0e-4812-bce4-523a42acd8ee
ORCHA signs historic partnership with Cogniss to unlock next generation of digital health
Two digital health companies, ORCHA and Cogniss, have announced a global partnership that will benefit from the new UK-Australian Free Trade Agreement (FTA) which has just passed through the UK House of Commons and is anticipated to come into effect in 2023.
The FTA will drive increased trade, two-way investment, economic growth and job creation. It’s the first international FTA the UK government has negotiated from scratch since leaving the EU.
ORCHA is the UK-based world leader in digital health evaluation and distribution. Australian-based Cogniss is a no-code digital health platform which enables innovators to create solutions without any need for coding or technical expertise.
Under the new partnership, apps created through the Cogniss no-code platform will meet ORCHA Baseline Review standards in relation to data, security and accessibility. This will streamline the app development and evaluation process, and enable healthcare professionals to develop bespoke content that meets professional assurance standards but without the need for them to have advanced technical expertise.
It will also help reduce regulatory and technical barriers and increase quality; issues that frequently hinder solutions from making their way into the NHS and Medicare, Australia’s universal health care scheme.
Speaking at an event held at Australian High Commission hosted by Senator Hon Don Farrell, Fiona Costello, SVP of Accreditations at ORCHA said:
“We are often approached by clinicians with solutions to the problems they are facing, but they lack the time, resources and expertise to build them, therefore relying on commercial products that are not always a perfect fit. Alongside Cogniss, we can now help them to understand the criteria to create high quality technologies and, through this partnership, support them to develop market-ready solutions.”
Dr Lloyd Humphreys, Cogniss’s newly appointed Managing Director, said:
“Having founded and created a digital health solution for addictions back in 2009, it took over two years and a million pounds of investment. Since then, nothing has changed in the way we design and create apps. Cogniss represents a complete paradigm shift for the sector and working with ORCHA further accelerates the ability to lower the barriers for clinical entrepreneurs to create great technology that solves the challenges they are facing.”
Cogniss is currently setting up global headquarters in Cambridge with support from the UK Department of International Trade, Investment NSW and Austrade.