In 2019, Humber, Coast and Vale Integrated Care System (ICS) (now Humber and North Yorkshire ICS) set out their Strategy for Digital Transformation. At the time, the population served by the ICS was 1.4 million people, with 23% of the population living in the most deprived areas of the UK, and a high proportion of this population living in extremely rural and isolated areas.
The ICS was under a great deal of pressure. If no transformational changes took place, the Humber, Coast and Vale ICS expected a budget deficit of at least £420 million by 2020/21.
Digital transformation was fundamental to improving the health of both citizens and the system itself. During the process of developing its digital strategy, the ICS commissioned a public survey to ensure any digital transformation was aligned with their citizens’ needs. Amongst the responses to questions on digital improvements to the patient experience were several requests for patient-related healthcare apps.
Despite the fact that the growing adoption of digital health was clear, many health and care professionals had difficulty knowing how to incorporate it into their service delivery. Staff reported it was hard to tell which of the hundreds of thousands of them available would be relevant and beneficial to the vulnerable people they support.
The Humber, Coast and Vale ORCHA Digital Health Library launched in 2019 at hcv.orcha.co.uk (now at hny.orcha.co.uk), with the intention of delivering quality-assured digital health to their population. The Library contained only apps compliant with safety standards, and provided an easy way to search for the highest rated apps across a wide range of issues.
In 2020, the project team chose supporting healthy living and long-term condition management as key focus areas for their population, particularly with face-to-face services being halted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team identified social prescribers as being particularly well-placed to deliver these services, and connected ORCHA’s team behind the implementation of the Library with teams such as Citizens Advice Clinic.
Social prescribers at the Citizens Advice Clinic found the inclusion of assessed digital health technologies within their work to be an incredibly valuable additional tool.
Elaine Elsdon at the Citizens Advice Clinic was introduced to the Humber ORCHA Library in May 2020, and began using it right away. She has found that the assurance of being able to signpost people to the health technologies available, in combination with the robust review process behind their inclusion in the Library, is very reassuring to the people she supports.
The wide variety of health and care technologies (including apps) that are identified in the Library for each condition area means that she can identify support for the wide range of people supported by the Clinic. If a client presents an issue which she hasn’t previously found a solution for, she can simply search to see which assessed solutions are available, and recommend them securely to her clients.
Mainly focusing on mental health and exercise and weight management apps, Elaine has adopted the recommendation of apps to her clients, with resounding success. Many of the clients being supported by the Clinic haven’t considered using apps for their health, but may be looking for support either in addition to or as an alternative to medication and traditional therapies. As accessing services became difficult during lockdown, Citizens Advice clients have found great use for apps to support the management of their own health.
Furthermore, as many felt during the pandemic that they might be using up limited resources which would be better spent elsewhere, or that the complexities of trying to access these services was causing them stress, the instant accessibility of support provided by health apps was and remains very much preferable. As traditional services have begun to be reinstated, Elaine has found that health apps have continued to provide support to her clients, some of whom don’t wish to access helplines or face-to-face or group therapy sessions.
The ORCHA Pro functionality has also been incredibly helpful to Elaine, allowing her to keep track of which apps she has recommended to whom, and based on this, to find solutions for clients with similar health concerns. As well as being able to track previously successful apps, Elaine can find new apps, and apps for health concerns she hasn’t previously been presented with. Furthermore, through ORCHA’s Digital Health Academy, Elaine can continue to develop her understanding and use of digital health.
Elaine Elsdon, Link Worker at Citizens Advice Clinic said
“Without ORCHA, I just would not have ever considered recommending any app at all. So for me, it’s opened up a completely new world. And therefore, it’s influenced me. It’s made me a better practitioner because I have more tools available to me, and it’s opened up a wider conversation with my clients about different kinds of support that are available out there. I think that can only be good, for me as a practitioner but also for my clients because it gives them a much broader opportunity to look into options that might be a better fit for their needs. Not everybody wants to go to a face-to-face group in the community, and something like an app might just prove to be a perfect solution for someone.”
The health apps themselves have been incredibly beneficial for many clients. Mental health apps in particular had very positive effects for those who had perhaps been guided through various coping strategies, but, due to the nature of mental health illnesses, found it difficult to remember what they were supposed to do when they were struggling. By accessing mental health support on their phones, however, they found that they could practice these strategies as many times as they needed to, without feeling judged in any way, or as if they were taking up time or resources.
One mental health app in particular, an AI chatbot app called Woebot, has been very successful in supporting Citizens Advice clients, as it allows them to work through and reframe thought patterns they are struggling with, as many times as they need to. One user described it as “a friend in my back pocket 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Chloe, a client at Citizens Advice Clinic said
“[The app] is very good. It helped me to change my mindset. I can have self-destructive and negative thought patterns and it helped me to challenge those thoughts. It’s such a shame I didn’t have this app in Lockdown. It’s so helpful because I can just offload to the app any time of the day or night and clear my head. I think of this as my little buddy, and I look forward to the next goal we can work on together.”
To date, the Humber Library (now relaunched as Humber and North Yorkshire, in line with changes to the ICS) has had almost 10,000 page views. There are over 100 ORCHA Pros registered to the Humber site, with the most popular apps being recommended residing within the mental health and healthy living categories, and having a particular focus on anxiety and depression, relaxation techniques, and cognitive behavioural therapy. Mental health is by far the most searched term within the Library, but searches for diabetes, fitness and weight management apps are also common.
We’re delighted to see our Founding CEO, Liz Ashall-Payne’s, contribution to The Economist’s Technology Quarterly publication. Liz’s contribution, included in the article, ‘Apps interpreting data from wearable devices are helping people to live better’, discusses the appetite for digital health, and the quality of health and care apps that are available.
Liz flags that, while “Appetite for [health and wellness apps] is healthy, with around 5m app downloads per day”, “95% of those downloads will be deleted within 24 hours”.
ORCHA continually evaluates the quality of health and care apps, and Liz explores in the article how the maturation of the digital health market, and the introduction of new guidelines for health apps, is impacting the changing quality of such apps.
Access the full article on The Economist website here.
Daresbury, MAY 2, 2022 – With more than 86 million Americans already using a health or fitness app, digital health brings new possibilities for the healthcare industry.
Yet, in a field of 365,000 products, where the vast majority fall outside of existing regulations, such as the medical device regulations, federal laws and government guidance, there has been no clear way to determine if a product is safe to use. This is stopping the national adoption of digital health, particularly in the fields of condition management, clinical risk assessment and decision support.
The Organization for the Review of Care and Health Applications (ORCHA), today announce its involvement with a new U.S. framework for assessing digital health technologies, including mobile apps and web-based tools used by healthcare providers and consumers, led by The American College of Physicians (ACP), the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) and ORCHA.
The Digital Health Assessment Framework (DHAF) is intended to be an open framework, accessible for anyone to use, to support the adoption of high-quality digital health technologies and help healthcare professionals and patients make better-informed decisions about which digital health tools best suit their needs. The Framework includes components to assess privacy and security, clinical assurance and safety, and usability, and was crafted to support U.S.-specific guidelines, regulations and best practices for digital health technologies.
The American College of Physicians is launching a pilot test of a database of digital health tools reviewed against the new framework by ORCHA.
Commenting on the announcement, Tim Andrews, COO, ORCHA, said:
“Although it’s designed specifically for the needs and requirements of the US market, the Framework doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. It recognizes and points to relevant existing US regulations, and applies several leading international standards and frameworks, ISO 82304-2 in Europe, Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC) and NICE evidence standards framework in the UK, and DiGA in Germany. We have already assessed a number of products against the framework, and look forward to supporting innovators and health providers to understand where their digital health inventory stands against the benchmark.”
For further information, please visit: us.orchahealth.com.
About ORCHA
ORCHA is the world’s number one software platform for delivering safe digital health. Healthcare providers, professionals and digital health developers in twelve countries use the ORCHA award-winning software platform to deliver digital health safely.
Its product range is built around a closed loop system, delivering the core infrastructure needed to introduce digital health safely, and the governance needed to manage risk. Products include assessment, digital health libraries, formularies, prescription tools and training.
It has completed over 17,000 assessments on 7,000 apps. Its business intelligence technology, matched with an expert team, assesses a product against security, privacy, accessibility and clinical assurance criteria, in a repeatable process, with unmatched speed and accuracy.
To ensure patient safety and professional fit and function remain at its forefront, ORCHA has appointed GP and digital health expert Tom Micklewright as Clinical Director to guide its team of clinical advisors and build an international community of clinical experts who are champions in digital health.
As Clinical Director, Dr Micklewright will head up a 13-strong, and growing, clinical team, representing a wide range of medical expertise across the system, including primary, secondary and tertiary care. The team’s role is to clinically assess the safety and effectiveness of digital health tools and to support the adoption of digital health amongst healthcare professionals through research, education, product development and clinical leadership.
Dr Micklewright has been supporting ORCHA as Primary Care Lead for the last eighteen months. He also works as a Cheshire-based GP, a digital health consultant and joins ORCHA from the online GP service Push Doctor, where he was recently Associate Medical Director. He said:
“As a GP working throughout the pandemic, I saw both innovations which scaled at a phenomenal pace and those that surprisingly struggled to get off of the ground. Digital transformation occurs when need, opportunity and simplicity converge and as a busy GP, simplicity is especially important. Finding time to learn about health tech and to become confident using it safely and effectively feels almost impossible, even though we’re all aware of the need and the opportunity: that’s the very gap that ORCHA is looking to close.”
Speaking about ORCHA’s focus on building its clinical team, founding CEO Liz Ashall-Payne, said:
“Clinicians are extremely valuable within digital health companies, for their clinical knowledge, academic background and their understanding of safety, risk, ethics and leadership. More importantly though, clinicians bring lived experience of working in healthcare within their speciality and professional group; this is vitally important to creating usable solutions and achieving digital transformation on the front-line.”
The clinical team spans the UK, with each member also working as a frontline healthcare professional. It will be further expanded over the next year, recruiting clinicians from additional medical disciplines and international health systems. Interested healthcare professionals are encouraged to monitor the careers page on the ORCHA website (https://careers.orchahealth.com).
Dr Micklewright has encouraged frontline clinicians to share their views on digital health at the frontline and the service ORCHA provides, adding that:
“In my view, digital health is our best opportunity for managing the demand and capacity challenges facing modern healthcare. I would therefore encourage healthcare practitioners, especially those who worry about technology and their own digital confidence, to come to digital health with a curious mind, the courage to look ahead and an optimism that by investing time today, we can create a better, more sustainable healthcare model for tomorrow.”