ORCHA’s CEO, Liz Ashall-Payne, was recently interviewed by MobiHealthNews, in which she discussed the health app landscape.
ORCHA’s CEO, Liz Ashall-Payne, was recently interviewed by MobiHealthNews, in which she discussed the health app landscape. Speaking about the many unregulated health apps on the market, Liz said:
“It’s quite a fast-changing landscape of regulation and requirements, and so absolutely we have to support the innovators, but equally, once they’re informed of those requirements, they need to step up.”
ORCHA supports app developers in meeting the constantly changing regulations so that their apps can meet the safest and most effective standards. Liz explains that:
“When we’ve reviewed an app, we contact the developer and we provide them with a report that tells them exactly what they need to do to be able to show clinical effectiveness, along with all the other relevant standards that they may potentially not be adhering to.”
By enabling app developers to constantly improve their apps and ensure they are meeting regulatory standards, ORCHA simultaneously allows consumers and health professionals to access the best apps for their individual needs. You can search ORCHA’s App Finder here.
Read Liz’s full interview with MobiHealthNews.
ORCHA looks at more than 160 elements of an app, including clinical effectiveness, data security and
patient usability.
ORCHA looks at more than 160 elements of an app, including clinical effectiveness, data security and
patient usability. Here are three top scoring apps that are designed to help patients avoid critical
situations:
– Avoiding Diabetes – Liva UK is included within the Healthier You: NHS Diabetes Prevention
Programme. It’s a free app that supports patients in monitoring and managing their lifestyle.
– Skin cancer detection – SkinVision is a class 1 medical device supported by a team of skin
health professionals, to track and detect skin cancer.
-Suicide prevention – developed by Grassroots Suicide Prevention, Stay Alive is a pocket
suicide prevention resource, to provide support if you’re having suicidal thoughts, or know
someone else who is.
Due to our continual re-review process, all app scores are subject to change. As such, we’d always encourage you to view our app reviews on our App Library, as this reflects Live data and app updates which are continuously changing. Our re-review process ensures that the most up-to-date information for the latest version of an app can be accessed via our App Library.
The Long Term Plan highlights the importance of innovation and development to improve efficiency in the NHS.
What does a service look like for those who know more about tech than ‘we’ do?
The Long Term Plan highlights the importance of innovation and development to improve efficiency in the NHS. If we’re trying to increase the uptake of digital health across our population for future benefit, then it seems obvious that we need to engage our children and young people.
Since I have been working at ORCHA Digital Healthy Schools has been my main focus. I’m now leading this programme and I absolutely love it. I have to admit, coming from a clinical patient facing background, I initially found it difficult to understand the digital aspects of the programme. But, the more I work with it and the more it evolves; the more invested I become and the more excited I am about its importance and innovativeness. Now the programme is being rolled out by North West London Collaboration of Clinical Commissioning Groups, Lancashire County Council, and Blackburn and Darwen Council, I can see how necessary this package is and we are all excited to see the positive impact it has on thousands of students.
This programme really links priorities cited by education and health e.g. the national ‘healthy schools’ programmes, the DfE strategy 2015-2020, Public Health England’s Strategic Plan, NHS England’s ‘Healthy Children’ report 2016. But it also clearly meets the priorities and agendas set out in the NHS Long Term Plan. The report states that ‘mental health support for children and young people will be embedded in schools and colleges’ and goes on to suggest that ‘the NHS work with schools, parents and local councils [to] reveal whether more upstream preventative support, including better information sharing and the use of digital interventions, helps moderate the need for specialist child and adolescent mental health services’.
In other words, let’s get young people educated in digital health and empower them to support their own health and well-being; to prevent escalation of health and well-being difficulties and reduce the need for onward referrals. This is not to instead of referring to services such as CAMHS, or to stop children accessing face-to-face support when they need it. This is an extra layer of support that is in the palm of most young people’s hands already. Instead of complaining about young people being on their phones too much, let’s harness this and show them how to responsibly use digital health. If we can help a young person to stay well physically and mentally without escalating to the point of needing an onward referral, then that is a positive outcome for everyone.
The Digital Healthy Schools programme does all of this. It helps educate the next generation about taking responsibility for their own health and well-being. It provides busy teachers with an accessible and easy-to-use PSHE package to teach children and young people about responsible use of apps. It also provides teaching staff with the ability to recommend apps directly and discreetly to their students, supporting pastoral care. The package provides education organisations with a digital hub which includes a customisable app finder in which the apps are reviewed and age appropriate. The hub also includes promotional resources such as social media posts, banners, and email content to enable the organisation to promote their hub.
The programme meets the needs of children and young people with regards to the NHS Long Term Plan as well as the needs of the education system to provide quality PSHE and pastoral care. It also supports the STEM agenda and other national initiatives such as ‘active living’. It really does tick quite a few boxes. I could continue to sing the praises of the programme and how I really believe it is delivering support to children and young people in the way they want to access it, but this post would end up far too long. For more information contact us at hello@ORCHA.co.uk
The NHS long term plan acknowledges that services must recognise that individuals have different needs when it comes to access to health care.
What 3 things will activate the nation?
The NHS long term plan acknowledges that services must recognise that individuals have different needs when it comes to access to health care. It places an emphasis on ‘responsiveness to the diverse people who use and fund our health service’. It highlights that service users have ‘individual preferences on type and location of care’ and indicates that ‘with the right support, people of all ages can […] take more control of how they manage their physical and mental well-being’. It’s clear to me that ORCHA’s vision is completely aligned with the vision for the NHS.
ORCHA is the world leading health app advisor. We help NHS and care organisations, along with their professional communities, to successfully integrate safe and effective health apps into their services. Our mission is simple – to get more people using great digital health products and services.
After working with 15% of the NHS, we’ve identified three main barriers to this goal, which we strive to break down every day:
A huge chunk of the population dabble with fitness apps, and many dip in and out of well-being Apps. But the statistics show that the general population don’t really think of apps as a viable option for health care management to complement or reduce their need for use of NHS patient facing services.
We all know how to find and download health an app, right? Actually, no we don’t. Finding apps in health and care can be very difficult. A search term in an App store will return some of the available apps, with little correlation between the top-rated Apps on these platforms and those Apps that achieve a high level of compliance and accreditation.
Reviews on google play or the App store aren’t reliable. How does the general public find apps that suit their needs and are effective? How do professionals know where to go for apps that have been checked for data privacy, clinical safety and efficacy and system security?
On the continuing journey to break down these barriers ORCHA continues to develop a range of products and services. Products and services which are ready to support the NHS in its newly announced vision.
Health and care apps are stringently reviewed and placed in the ORCHA app library which acts as a comparison site. But how do we get people of all ages to use these reviewed apps to support their health and well-being?
For those that are already looking
NHS trusts and CCGs are commissioning ORCHA to create local app libraries which they can customise with their own local branding and link in to their patient facing sites. ORCHA also reviews apps to populate the NHS national app library which is accessible to everyone.
These sites can reflect local and/or national health agendas and priorities and therefore usher patients in the right direction. This means that the NHS locally and nationally can focus on the conditions prioritised in the NHS long term plan e.g. cancer, mental health, diabetes, multimorbidity, healthy ageing, children’s health, cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, and learning disability and autism.
For those that are not looking
Many patients may not take the initiative to find these sites and we need to support people of all ages and backgrounds to access these resources. The majority of people have a smart phone and/or iPad, but just don’t realise its potential to support their health and well-being. People don’t know that there are apps that can support diagnosed health conditions (e.g. COPD, diabetes) provide advice and support (e.g. smoking cessation, child health), or meet a need whilst they’re on a waiting list (e.g. help with sleep, anxiety or depression), amongst many other things.
But we do know that patients look to professionals for health recommendations and advice and they trust what they are told. So, harnessing this, ORCHA provide the pro-solution enabling NHS professionals to recommend or ‘prescribe’ an app directly to their patient or service user. I know as a clinician I was regularly asked to recommend apps, but I didn’t know what was out there, which were effective, safe etc. Using the pro-solution, clinicians know that that the apps they are recommending have been stringently reviewed.
What next?
Well, this post by no means covers all the fantastic work that ORCHA does, or how this work completements the NHS Long Term Plan. But what we know is that the NHS is committed to supporting the population in harnessing the power of digital technology to improve patient care and engagement, as well as redirect patient facing services to those that need it. The Long Term Plan outlines the future of our NHS and indicates that it needs to work with other organisations to achieve their goals, and ORCHA are proud to be supporting and working with our national treasure to do this.
Up next… empowering young people to use digital health