The potential for health care is obvious and huge. Imagine:

1. How many patients in the last hour experienced the inconvenience of getting lost on the way to an appointment in a hospital, and were consequently late?
2. How many junior doctors made phone calls this morning to locate patients admitted under the care of their consultant overnight, and then found out about others later on in the day?
3. This list of scenarios could go on and on…

A Westfield Stratford City app for a hospital has so much potential, I don’t even know where to start.

So I will reach out to others to also comment on what they think about the Westfield Stratford City app and I’ll combine comments for another posting in a day or two.

Shai

So what would happen if these two existing map resources for bowel cancer and breast cancer were more like Mapumental maps?

Perhaps the Mapumental commuter distance map is already ideal for patients and carers, e.g. for repeat appointments for cancer treatment or post-operative physiotherapy.

A new idea for a map is Locating You, which sounds like Find my iPhone but for people. Here is a quote from the Maps and Apps entry for Locating You.

“Time and again we see patients, visitors and even staff lost within hospital corridors, unable to comprehend the hospital maps. This is a simple app to reduces stress and late arrival to appointments

Imagine a cross between Find my iPhone and Mapumental: what would the potential uses be?

I will have a look for other entries specifically for maps and try to understand their similarities and differences. I’ll share my findings ASAP.

Shai

Apparently eight gadgets from Star Trek now exist. And a recent apps contest in the US was won by Terminator Vision, an app that uses an iPhone camera to scan faces, and then present information from that person’s Facebook profile (all with authentic red glow, the 45s video is well worth watching!).

The Tricorder X prize

The articles reminded me of the device used by Star Trek medics, whereby Drs McCoy, Crusher et al would wave attachments from a smartphone-sized device around an acutely injured/ill person and then instantly diagnose and treat the problem.

That device is called the medical tricorder, and (amazingly IMO) there is a competition to make it. The Tricorder X prize is explained in this quote:

The Tricorder X PRIZE will award $10 million to the team that develops a mobile solution that can inexpensively diagnose patients by combining expert systems and medical point-of-care data—such as lab-on-a-chip or wireless sensors, provide a recommended course of treatment, and upload all relevant data to the cloud.

I think the Tricorder X prize sets an excellent example for maps and apps to learn from. I believe the main relevance of the Tricorder X prize to maps and apps is their shared open innovation origin, and not the financial incentive for the X prize.

Back of an envelope style

I think the NHS may already have spent more than $10 million dollars in time, wasted time/opportunity costs and research funding for maps and apps.

With millions of smartphones in use, and with innovators creating sci-fi apps for fun, I think millions of medical tricorders may already exist, its just that we use them mostly as phones.

I’ll reach out to the X Prize Foundation to make a new connection, and share this with some open innovation experts to seek their views.

Shai

Phil O’ Connell: “All too often, the obvious benefits that an app can bring for patients’ health and wellbeing (not to mention the productivity gains for Health and Social Care) are dismissed by those who have the authority to buy and promote the services. Few of them understand the disruptive technology market “its cheap/free, so how can it be effective”.

Virtually all Health and Social Care organisations that deploy/support apps and telehealth duplicate the wasteful process of developing their own business case from scratch. All that is needed is a common, shared, pragmatic approach. Using a library of approved business case models, a simple process could guide us through the creation of new cases. This could include variables such as cost-per-patient, and (tied in with QIPP) expected productivity benefits/savings.

Health and Social Care are years behind the commercial sector in this regard, and the immature nature of the health apps market exacerbates the situation whilst we all attempt to re-invent the wheel, stifle innovation and end up paying too much for too little benefit.

The Twitter conversation focused on taking the #mapsandapps work forward. It was unbelievably useful. Topics included how to classify the ideas gathered, how to regulate and accredit apps and how any qualified provider in the future may use apps. There were so many useful links I could barely keep up.

So far I have used this blog to highlight interesting apps and make connections to existing websites or apps. I will continue to do this, but I would also like to explore a different angle.

I would like to explore how this simple platform can be shared to drive collaboration for shared benefit. IMHO, successful collaboration Re: maps and apps will initially drive collaborative learning and help us all move forward together, fast.

I found this recent blog posting on collaboration, there are three criteria listed for successful collaboration and I feel all three are in place for maps and apps.

So I will reach out to maps and apps experts and enthusiasts to make blog postings. The brief will be simple: tell us all what we don’t know and share your vision.

So I’ll stop talking, and start inviting contributions.

Shai

• Over 3 million people juggle care with work, this is roughly one in eight workers in the UK
• 81% of carers are concerned about the impact of cuts to services and benefits

So I’m starting to think about how millions of carers looking after millions of patients may already be using their smartphones to help make things easier.

I looked through the submitted ideas to get a feel for existing and future apps for carers. Here are a few that jumped out as especially relevant for carers and families:

1. Rally Round (already exists), makes it possible for friends and family to coordinate tasks around someone who needs care/support
2. Home care for everyone is not entered as a utility for carers, but I can imagine carers finding it useful to schedule nurse visits and track the delivery of prescriptions
3. Alzheimer’s tracker (already exists, £34.99), helps understand patterns in symptoms

(I haven’t included apps related to managing medications, see this post for more info on this.)

RallyRound reminds me a little of Tyze.com, a service from a non-healthcare origin. Tyze.com makes it possible for networks to develop around individuals, providing a platform to coordinate informal support and goodwill.

In my opinion, the list of current uses of Tyze.com on their website reads like a wishlist of apps for carers:

Adult children caring for their aging parents

People experiencing acute or chronic illness

Families supporting a member with a disability

Individuals facing a life challenge

Professional care providers seeking to provide coordinated care

People seeking to enrich their connections with family and friends

I feel that the specific needs of carers need to be explored in this project, and I’m interested to know what others think about this angle.

I’d like to contact individuals and organisations that might accept the invitation to suggest their ideal app and share the apps they currently use. Please contact me via Twitter: @SR_disrupt.

As a first step I will reach out to @GemmaAt_CMHCSWS and @CarersUK to invite their contributions to this blog.

Shai

I read this link after receiving a retweet about the World Bank eAtlas mapping tool. I’d like to share some of the text from the page, crossing out a few key words that could be replaced by NHS or similar (you’ll see what I mean). Hopefully this will help explain why I’d like to encourage more ideas for maps:

“The World Bank eAtlas NHS mapping tool, developed in cooperation with Harper Collins UK, clinicians, patients and the public, allows users to easily and quickly transform data into customized visual comparisons across time, countries, and regions. The resulting full color maps and graphs can subsequently be exported for sharing, used in presentations, and saved for later use.

Each eAtlas also allows users to…

• map indicators by latest available data (per country) or a given year
• compare two maps side by side
• read descriptions of the thematic groups of indicators
• find indicators by word search or through related themes
• create time-series graphs for specific countries
• view data in a ranking order table or bar graph
• alter map colors, intervals, and more
• bookmark, share, export maps or data files, and import data.

User can also upload their own data to map and compare with World Bank NHS data, graph or map two indicators, and dynamically generate maps that “animate” changes in data over time.”

I realise there is an NHS Atlas of Variation, but it’s not an app (as far as I’m aware) and I’m not sure the hard copy publication helps with all of the features listed above.

Do these digital maps already exist? I expect they do, I hope you can add them to the site and I’d like very much to hear from Public Health colleagues, charities, societies and members of the public with examples of maps that reflect the details above.

Shai

In the last 50 tweets with the hashtag #nhssm, 8,125 people were connected with a frantic Twitter debate about our work. (This information is taken from Tweetreach, shared originally by @a_double_tt.)

The debate was incredible, there were five or six themes at any one time passing each other in a single discussion, I couldn’t keep up. But one theme really struck me:

How many trusts and commissioners have started something with apps?

How many hundreds of hours have been spent in 2011 so far on apps for the local communities around a hospital or within a PCT/PCT cluster’s influence?

All of the contributors to the Twitter debate on apps seemed to have examples to share, which makes me think the 361 ideas so far represent a tip of an iceberg.

Here’s a summary of the chat.

Once the transcript is shared by the great people behind #nhssm, I will make a more detailed posting to share the headline findings and invite more contributions to this blog.

Shai

These examples are wide ranging in their purpose, rather than focusing specifically on health, but they do demonstrate the variety of uses for apps.

We are continuing to see amazing examples of existing apps, recommended on this site. Here are two examples:

Universal Doctor Speaker enables you to communicate with doctors in Spanish, English, French, Chinese, German, Portuguese, Moroccan Arabic and Catalan. On the homepage you select your language and the doctor’s language, you then pick from lists of statements in your language in eight categories, e.g. Urgent appointment, and when you tap the statement you wish to say, e.g. I need a doctor who speaks my language, an audio clip follows. It’s so simple.

It makes me think of Word Lens, an app that enables instant translation using the camera on your smartphone. This 69 second video is really worth watching in my opinion, the potential for use in health care seems very powerful.

CaSH 2U (Contraception & Sexual Health) is an app for young people across Wirral to access information about emergency contraception, chlamydia testing, pregnancy support and other issues to do with contraception and sexual health. All the information can be downloaded by scanning a QR code. Here are some images from the app:

The discussion around this idea highlights similar work in Shropshire and Kent, there seems to be a collaborative feel to the comments.

This is similar in concept to Foursquare, which has more than 10 million worldwide users. Here is a 2 minute introduction to Foursquare:

I will keep highlighting existing apps added to the site, but I’m also starting to think about more general popular apps and how they might be used in health and social care.

Imagine if Universal Doctor Speaker was crossed with Word Lens, or CaSH 2 U was crossed with Foursquare.

Shai

This request prompted me to look for mental health apps. The variety of suggestions is incredible, here are a few:

1. Moodscope already exists, it helps users measure and track their state of mind
2. OASIS – online mental health support is in development, more info here
3. Bipolar disorder self management strategies app suggests the evolution of useful, existing websites to accessible apps
4. Relapse prevention for psychosis would help monitor early warning signs
5. Early intervention in psychosis app seems to be lined up for production this year
6. Mental capacity act app would help clinicians work safely within legal limits
7. Cognitive behavioural therapy trainer would help with a variety of coping strategies
8. Mental health empowerment app is a collaboration between South London and Maudsley Foundation Trust and Microsoft
9. Alert mental health sufferers and carers to a possible episode would recognise changes in patterns to identify depression, anxiety and other problems
10. Mental health check would enable users to explore symptoms and treatments
11. The mental health recovery app would empower users to manage their recovery

Thinking ahead, it seems to me that the mental health community of clinicians and service users could help curate these ideas and help make connections with existing or planned work.

I previously blogged about a suggestion by a Consultant Psychiatrist to connect GPs and specialists, and I’m starting to think that mental health clinicians and service users can really help with the next steps in this work.

So I will reach out to @rcpsych, @rcpsychtrainees, @rethink_, @NHSConfed_MHN and any other suggestions you can make to encourage guest blog postings, more ideas and votes.

Shai