Liz Ashall-Payne, founding CEO of ORCHA, presented yesterday at a United Nations symposium on digital health.
The invite-only conference, which is billed an ‘intellectual supercollider’, was streamed by UNESCO to 150 countries.
Liz’s presentation outlined ORCHA’s work in the field of digital health accreditation and focused on its development, with the Nordic Interoperability Project/ N!P, of the world’s first cross-border digital health evaluation programme.
She said:
“I briefed the delegates on a cross-border project which ORCHA supported across the Nordics. I believe there are lessons here which could be relevant as we roll out safe digital health across the globe.”
The Nordic region, which encompasses Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland, has a transient population, so it makes sense for these separate nations to integrate their health systems so that citizens are supported on the move. Despite the 365,000 digital health technologies on the market, no standardised regulation or risk management system is in place in any of the Nordic states, let alone any shared standards between the countries.
The Nordic Digital Health and Evaluation Criteria (NordDEC) programme has been created by N!P together with ORCHA to unify digital health standards across multiple countries, so that safe digital health can reach citizens across the entire region.
Liz said that lessons learned from the NordDEC could now be rolled out globally – bringing countries, regions and continents together in a joint effort to get better healthcare to more people.
She added:
“The invitation to speak at this great event came via Martin Curley of Ireland’s Health Service Executive, after our meeting earlier this year. Thank you Martin for giving ORCHA this opportunity.”
The patients of Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (HUTH) are to be encouraged to use technology to help them self-manage long term conditions and wait well for elective procedures.
Patients using the Patients Know Best portal to access their medical records and interact with the professional teams will be offered several opportunities, via the platform itself, to get free access to an ORCHA Health App Library containing hundreds of highly rated health apps.
Once accessed, using a straightforward search function, they can input details of their condition and quickly find digital health solutions to help them monitor and manage their symptoms, plus maintain healthy lifestyles through, for example, smoking cessation and weight maintenance.
This is a first-of-its-kind offer for hospital patients, which supports the NHS priority of tackling the 6.6m elective care waiting list. It also illustrates how NHS suppliers can work together creatively and productively to support the health system.
Lloyd Humphreys, Managing Director of ORCHA said:
“Patients Know Best is an exemplary platform and we’re delighted to be able to offer its users an enhanced level of support via our curated app library. It’s a fantastic example of how we can put new opportunities, literally, into the hands of patients – via their phones – when they are already online using a patient portal.
Sally Rennison CCO at PKB said:
“Recognising the role technology and data can play in empowering patients and delivering better outcomes is core to Patients Know Best’s founding mission and principle. By being able to open up more possibilities to patients to engage with technology and their data, through trusted partners like ORCHA, this digital ecosystem and supported, well-equipped patients can continue to grow. Knowing what makes good apps is key to continuing to build trust and engagement with patients, and we’re so pleased to be able to align with ORCHA who are the leaders in achieving this.”
Independent research commissioned by ORCHA found that 60% of people were ready and willing to try new methods of managing their health, in order to help the NHS, including using high-quality health apps.
Neil Proudlove, Deputy Chief Information Officer at HUTH said:
“The NHS was presented with a unique set of challenges during the pandemic and tackling the resulting backlog must involve thinking differently. This is an example of creative thinking by two providers – collaboration has to be the way forward.”
ORCHA is now exploring how to evolve the patient experience one step further, so that the apps offered can be tailored to the patient’s condition.
User Experience (UX) is key to the success of a digital health product. It doesn’t matter how beneficial a product has the potential to be, if the user isn’t using it as intended due to a poor user experience, they won’t be getting the most out of it.
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a widely used scale that is typically used to assess how usable software and hardware products are. The scale was not specifically designed to be used for mobile apps, or digital health products, but it has been used by some to do so.
To understand how useful and accurate it is, and to guide digital health suppliers, the ORCHA research team collaborated with Ulster University on a piece of research to discover whether the SUS can be used to reliably assess the usability of digital health products.
PhD researcher, Maciej Hyzy led the investigation, with support from authors including Sophie Hunt, Senior Digital Health Assessor, and Dr Simon Leigh, Director of Research at ORCHA. The team analysed previously published research to find digital health products which had published SUS scores. They then analysed the distribution of these SUS scores for digital health products in different condition areas, to evaluate whether the existing benchmark of a mean SUS score of 68 (widely accepted for software and hardware products) is relevant when evaluating the usability of digital health products. They found that overall, the SUS is a good starting point for measuring usability in digital health products. However, given that the findings are highly subjective, and demonstrated to be variable by condition area, more work needs to be done in this space, perhaps with reference to more objective and evidence-based approaches to assessing UX.
It was clear from the analysis that future work should aim to supplement the subjective user experience assessments provided by the SUS with questions that can be answered more objectively. This will enable us to understand exactly why some digital health products provide a better user experience than others. We can then learn exactly what makes a digital health product with good user experience.
The report has been published in JMIR Publications mHealth and uHealth, and is available to read on Ulster University’s website.
PhD researcher, Maciej, said:
“The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a widely used scale that has been used to quantify the usability of many software and hardware products. However, the SUS scale was not specifically designed to evaluate mobile apps, or indeed digital health products. The objective of this study was to examine whether the widely used SUS distribution for benchmarking (mean of 68 and standard deviation of 12.5) can be used to reliably assess the usability of digital health products.”
If you have any questions about this research, or about how ORCHA assesses user experience, please get in touch with us at hello@orchahealth.com.
Featured image:ORCHA team stood together outside
The ranking was compiled by technology magazine Business Cloud. It follows a succession of other award wins for ORCHA and its founder Liz Ashall-Payne, in just the last few months.
Commenting on her company’s inclusion in the ranking, Liz said: “Founding a health-tech start up has been an incredible challenge and has taken immense resilience. To be where we are today, with a committed team of creative, motivated colleagues, is fantastic. Massive thanks to all those voted for us to be in this prestigious ranking.”
Other award successes for ORCHA so far in 2022 are:
ORCHA’s Health App Libraries are now used by doctors across extensive parts of the NHS and in 12 other countries. Health apps are routinely being recommended to help patients stop smoking, manage long term conditions, maintain a healthy weight, monitor their blood pressure, and much more.
Liz added: “The more we all turn to digital health tools, the more ORCHA will be needed. There’s an ongoing issue with quality. Only 20% of all the health apps we review – and we’ve done 20,000 reviews to date – meet the standards necessary for us to recommend them to the NHS.”
ORCHA’s rapid expansion means it is constantly recruiting. For details of the latest positions visit https://orchahealth.com/about-us/recruitment/.
Read more about the HealthTech 50 here: https://businesscloud.co.uk/healthtech-50-uks-most-innovative-health-technology-creators-for-2022