Our Mobile Health has been confirmed as one of eight test bed innovations to work in partnership with Care City as it joins Wave 2 of the NHS England Test Bed Programme.
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Care City is one of seven Test Beds selected for Wave 2 of the innovative health and care programme, focussed on tackling the challenges laid out in the NHS Five Year Forward View.

Long term conditions and lack of staff are the NHS’s biggest priority right now and Care City will respond to three East London STP challenges1, which are also present nationally. Care City’s ambitious programme will work to transform how we identify, treat and manage long-term conditions; increase skills and work force productivity; remodel areas of the workforce and service pathways across East London; and to scale these models nationally.

The Test Beds programme run by NHS England and the Office for Life Sciences tests combinations of digital technologies with pathway redesign in a clinical setting with real patients. It harnesses the potential of innovations to help transform the way in which healthcare is delivered; empowering staff to deliver care that improves the quality of life for patients and carers.
Care City will work in partnership with eight innovations (listed below) comprising of diagnostics, smartphone applications and management tools which are already making dramatic contributions to people with long-term conditions. Currently, there are barriers to their wider use caused by varying types of digital exclusion faced by patients, staff, organisations and systems. Care City will look at the power of junior members of the workforce to overcome those barriers, in partnership with patients.

The eight test bed innovations are:
TickerFit, DrDoctor, Whzan Digital Health, Healthy.io, Echo, Our Mobile Health, Sleepio, LIVA Life

​Further detail on the Care City website.

​[Text above has been taken from the press release issued by Care City on 23rd Oct 2018]

Our Mobile Health is pleased to again be supporting the AXA Health Tech & You Awards 2019. 

Do join us at the free event tomorrow evening, 30th October 2018 to launch the 2019 AXA Health Tech & You Awards.  Four new categories have been created to recognise entrepreneurs in both early-stage start-ups and later stage businesses who are changing the way people think about their health, while helping to solve the big problems in healthcare.

The four categories are as follows:

• The first 'innovation' category recognises pioneers in early-stage start-ups
• The second 'excellence' category recognises entrepreneurs leading later-stage businesses
• The third category, 'Mental Health in children', looks for solutions that can support children and/or their parents in understanding and managing mental health
• The fourth category on 'Sleep Problems' will recognise affordable tools proven to change behaviour and deliver better sleeping patterns

​You can register for this free event here - hope to see you there.

Thousands of people with Parkinson’s will be able to better manage their symptoms thanks to a revolutionary apps and devices library launched by Parkinson’s UK and Our Mobile Health. ​

In a first of its kind, ‘Tried and Tested’ offers technological solutions for managing Parkinson’s symptoms, including speech problems, drooling and freezing.
 
So far six apps and devices have been approved for the library, and more will follow.
 
Each app and device first goes through a rigorous independent review process used by Our Mobile Health to identify trustworthy digital health tools, before going into ‘real-life testing’ by people living with Parkinson’s, a condition that affects 145,000 people in the UK. ​ 

Our Mobile Health sourced the apps from developers and reviewed them against their rigorous quality assurance process, which identifies the ‘best of the best’ apps by reviewing them against ten key attribute areas.  An independent panel of expert reviewers looks at apps across a range of areas including patient safety, data security and indicators of effectiveness. Only apps which meet the high standards required are put forward to the charity for real-life testing. 
 Julie Bretland, Chief Executive of Our Mobile Health, said: “It is fantastic that digital health is being embraced in this way, to help those living with and managing lifelong conditions to be able to identify and embrace digital health interventions which they can have confidence in using.
 “We are proud to have been able to work so closely with Parkinson's UK on this new initiative. Using our rigorous independent health app review process we have been able to help identify potentially suitable health apps, thoroughly review them and identify those which can then be taken forward.
 “The user testing and feedback from those living with Parkinson's has been invaluable as it has helped to further improve the quality of apps and digital health solutions targeted at those living with Parkinson's.”
 All the tools featured in the library are designed to help people with Parkinson’s with everyday life. Parkinson’s can affect the voice – leaving some people barely audible - so the library features an app that records volume, pitch and speed of speech, with the results easily shareable with health professionals.

The library also features an app called Swallow Prompt to help prevent drooling, something many people with Parkinson’s can face due to difficulties with swallowing.
 
People can now also try recommended and reviewed apps to help them get some rest, as difficulty sleeping is a common problem for many living with Parkinson’s.
 
‘Tried and Tested’ is being spearheaded at Parkinson’s UK by Emma Lawton who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at 29. With her determined attitude to living well with Parkinson’s, Emma is always looking for new solutions and technology to help her live life to the full including taking part in the BBC’s Big Life Fix where technology experts invented a device that enabled her to draw again for the first time in years.
 
Emma, Project Lead for Apps and Devices at Parkinson’s UK, said: “Parkinson’s symptoms can make everyday tasks like getting dressed or making a cup of tea feel impossible, and that’s where technology has a massive role to play.

“Parkinson’s UK’s helpline was increasingly being asked whether apps and devices, that people had seen or heard about, could help with their symptoms.
“We wanted to provide consistent advice on this area with real conviction, as Parkinson’s UK should have a strong voice in this rapidly growing area. That’s why we created the library, to help provide the right advice and guide people to apps and devices that are safe and effective to use.”
The charity and Our Mobile Health now plan to grow the library, both by reviewing existing apps and devices but also by encouraging new designs from developers.
Julie Dodd, Director of Digital Transformation and Communication at Parkinson’s UK added: “With more than 40 symptoms of Parkinson’s and no new treatments for more than 50 years, there are still gaps in Parkinson’s treatment that we know technology can help us to address.
“Ultimately we want to see people being referred to the library alongside their medication. And we hope that other charities will follow, to create a network of libraries that can benefit people living with many different conditions.
“We are incredibly excited about the potential of technology to transform the lives of people living with long-term conditions like Parkinson’s and we are committed to leading the way to make this happen.”


If you have an app or device that you think would be suitable for this new library, please contact Our Mobile Health to discuss: e-mail Matt.Wilkinson@ourmobilehealth.com

Follow us on Twitter: @OurMobileHealth

A new competition to mark the 70th birthday of the NHS has been launched by Medopad, providers of digital health solutions. They are looking to select up to 140 of the greatest minds in the NHS to work with to create the future of medicine.

'Greatest Minds Competition' - full details here

Medopad will choose 70 lead consultants or nurses in rare diseases and 70 in acute and chronic conditions. Those chosen will be granted the use of the Medopad platform to transform patient care pathways, improve standard of care, or kickstart new clinical research.

Application deadline is 8th October 2108 and winners will be announced on 12th October 2018.

About Medopad
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Our Mobile Health service offerings are available on G-Cloud 10 (G10) procurement framework within the Digital Marketplace, having transitioned successfully from the previous G9 list.

G-Cloud 10 is part of the Government’s Digital Marketplace, created by a partnership between the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) and the Government Digital Service.  G-Cloud 10 enables any public sector organisation, including central government, local councils, NHS Trusts and other public sector bodies to purchase cloud-based information and technology services from a central website.

Public sector organisations can procure the Our Mobile Health cloud software service, our online, tailored library of rigorously assessed health apps, through this route as we are a supplier on the Digital Marketplace.

View full details on the G-Cloud 10 Digital Marketplace HERE.

Our Mobile Health aims to ensure that the NHS, public health, local government and other public sector organisations can offer the very best digital health and wellbeing interventions - from weight management and increased exercise to supporting the management of mental health and long term conditions, as well as helping people remain in their homes or be managed more effectively in the local community rather than being admitted to hospital.

A rigorous assessment method is applied. Our Mobile Health has worked with health organisations across England to develop this process, which is now the industry standard.

This means that doctors, nurses and other clinicians can use our services with confidence and help to drive up adoption of digital health and wellbeing apps, increasing recommendations and prescribing.

Buying such services through the Digital Marketplace framework can be faster and cheaper for public bodies than entering into individual procurement contracts.

Find out more: Digital Marketplace

Follow us on Twitter: @OurMobileHealth

One Health Tech caught up with CEO of Our Mobile Health, Julie Bretland for a conversation about how she came to set up the organisation, and it's vision and work to help verified and trustworthy digital health solutions make a practical impact on the way people manage their health.

Can you tell us about Our Mobile Health?
Our Mobile Health helps identify, assess, review, curate and distribute good high-quality health apps, so that health and care organisations can recommend, deploy and ultimately prescribe digital health services with confidence.  To that end we assess apps for the NHS apps library. We partner with EMIS to provide the EMIS app library powered by Our Mobile Health for GPs, we work with Parkinson's UK to identify and make available apps relevant to people with Parkinson's and we assess apps for London's Good Thinking Project.

How did the idea for Our Mobile Health App Library come about?
I was working in Africa on a project looking at how mobile electronic health records could help bridge the gap between the village health workers who saw patients in their homes, and the hospitals, often based four hours or more away in the cities.  When I came back to the UK, I realised that the UK, despite our fabulous global reputation for both health and technology, was actually behind in our adoption of digital health solutions.  Yet at the same time, we have all these changes we need to address in terms of greater life expectancy, poor lifestyles and budget constraints.

Apps and digital solutions were being developed, but we found either that the apps were being developed in isolation, either by or within the health service with little input from industry and the best practices. The user experience was often poor; data security standards were poor; and there were apps being promoted which stopped working when there was an update to the new operating system. Or apps were being developed by industry without the input of the health service, and thus there wasn’t the buy in from health professionals. As a result, health care professionals quite rightly didn’t have confidence in digital solutions and so the digital solutions weren’t adopted.

What we can bring to the party is good practice from the mobile industry, and an understanding of the regulations, standards and best practices that are already the norm. I ’ve been lucky enough to build a great team with years of experience in healthcare and a fabulous panel of clinicians, health professionals and academics who provide their independent expertise to help review products.

Our research showed that patients are quite happy to look at the app store for wellness apps but when they want to look for medical apps, they turn to their GP or healthcare professional; When it comes to apps, healthcare professionals don’t have anywhere to turn, as they would turn to a drug formulary for example for a medicine. So we fill that gap.

Who has access to the Our Mobile Health App Library? Is it available to the public?
We don’t have a single library that’s open to the public. Our aim isn’t to recreate the major apps stores but to provide a highly relevant portfolio of the best of the best apps. We do two things – we do a lot of work on identifying, assessing and reviewing apps according to an in-depth assessment process which we’ve co-developed over a number of years. Continued....

Read the full interview HERE

Follow Julie on Twitter: @JulieBretland

Winners of the 2018 FDM everywoman in Technology Awards were announced on 8th February.
 
The theme was “Inspiring Tomorrow’s World”, with this year’s programme focussing on the importance of nurturing an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics from a young age. Recent studies show the staggering shortage of female students choosing these subjects, including computer science (17.2% female) and engineering & technology (17% female).
 
This is one of the reasons why everywoman has created and showcased successful role models, women working in the technology industry who can inspire the younger generation to follow in their footsteps.
 
This year had a record-breaking number of entries, and further information and winners list can be found HERE
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​Our Mobile Health and Parkinson’s UK are to create a curated library of health and care apps and devices for people with Parkinson’s. The app library is in response to an increasing demand for digital health solutions from people with the condition.
 
People with Parkinson’s can expect to find apps that track symptoms and help them to manage their condition within the library, which is expected to launch early next year, all of which have been rigorously assessed by independent experts and tested by users who also have Parkinson’s.
 
Our Mobile Health will source the apps from developers and review them against their rigorous quality assurance process. The reviews are conducted by a panel of independent experts and look at a range of areas like patient safety, data security and indicators of effectiveness.
 
Julie Bretland, Founder and CEO of Our Mobile Health, says, “It’s fantastic that Parkinson’s UK are responding to the changing needs of people with Parkinson’s and embracing digital health interventions as convenient and supportive tools for those people living with and managing lifelong conditions on a daily basis.”
 
Parkinson’s UK are setting up a user panel who will test and evaluate these new digital tools.
Julie Dodd, Director of Digital Transformation and Communication at Parkinson’s UK commented, “We believe that technology is a vital part of helping people with the condition live empowered lives. Over the last year we’ve seen enquiries about apps and devices increase significantly. People turn to us for guidance on the apps and devices that work best, but until now we’ve been unable to recommend specific interventions with complete confidence. Not only will all the apps and devices in our library have been rigorously quality checked by Our Mobile Health, but our user panel will provide real-life feedback and guidance for other users.”
 
Emma Lawton, Devices and Apps Strategist at Parkinson’s UK, witnessed for herself how powerful technology can be when last year she was featured in the BBC2 Documentary 'Big Life Fix' where an inventor from Microsoft created a bespoke wearable device, the 'Emma Watch', which helped her to write and draw clearly again. She adds, “With very little advancement in treatments for Parkinson’s over the last 50 years, those of us with the condition are increasingly looking to technology to step up and help us manage our symptoms.”
 
Our Mobile Health are actively looking for app or device developers to submit their products for assessment for this ground-breaking initiative. Organisations or developers who have an app or device that could help support people with Parkinson’s can find out more by contacting Our Mobile Health via julie.bretland@ourmobilehealth.co.uk.    
 
Anyone with Parkinson's of any age in any area of the UK can apply to be part of the user panel. People interested in joining should contact us or fill in the form at: http://surveys.parkinsons.org.uk/s/technologypanel/. 

Digital health solutions are high on the agenda for health systems and providers and that means there are lots of opportunities out there to secure funding for new digital health interventions. As long as you have a good idea, think it through, and answer each of the questions fully, getting funding isn’t the challenge you might think.

A good idea?
Assessors tend to be older experienced people who know the topic well, so any attempt to dig up an old idea – perhaps one that got short shrift in an earlier funding competition – is likely to be summarily rejected, so don’t bother unless you have a new spin on it. As an example, investment cases for smart homes are old hat, however introducing robotics creates a whole new opportunity.

Harder to deal with are the “cost of failure” proposals which involve automating a process that shouldn’t by rights exist. For example, we know that many hospital doctors refuse to code their own interventions, resulting in hospitals losing substantial NHS tariff income in the UK. Therefore introducing handwriting recognition could actually be a step forwards. However, do we want to take that step, essentially into a cul-de-sac, or encourage direct coding, or even perhaps introduce voice recognition so they could speak it directly and have the precise code agreed verbally? Recognising that such thoughts will swirl around the heads of assessors, perhaps explaining how what looks like a cost of failure may be a step in the right direction, could make all the difference to the attractiveness of the proposal.

Thinking it through
One feature that has become evident recently is that good ideas need to integrate into care pathways: a ‘point solution’ that requires manual input and manual output is alien to a care pathway where data should flow from start to finish, with the patient and clinician. Integrate-ability is therefore almost essential. At the same time, a good idea that transforms a care pathway has ramifications well beyond that part of the pathway covered by your proposal, so do be sure to recognise all the implications and risks of the proposed transformation in your response. A demonstration of this was the Whole System Demonstrator programme where the name rightly recognised the potential impact of adding telecare and telehealth interventions, although by insisting on minimal care pathway change to maintain purity of RCT, the academics ensured very little whole system benefit.

Regulation is becoming increasingly important in the medical technology world, both of data privacy and medical devices. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on 25 May 2018 and has wide implications on things like explicit consent and where & how data is stored. For new investment proposals, perhaps the most important, if personal data is being stored and especially if it is sensitive personal data[1], is to recognise the need to seek professional expertise and include a sum for so doing.

For the medical device regulation, the lowest bar is the safety standard SCCi0129, which the NHS insists all hardware and software used clinically should comply with. This has important requirements like the appointment of a safety officer, the keeping of a log and such like. Far more significant though is the Medical Devices Regulation (MDR) due to come into force in early 2020. This is already replacing the Medical Devices Directive (MDD) as there is no ‘grandfathering’[2] allowed.

The key thing about this is to recognise that unless you have used good quality management practice specific to the medical device industry from the start of the development and manufacture of your hardware or software, you cannot subsequently receive CE certification; you have to go back and do it all over. This equally applies if your app, say, starts off merely as wellbeing device and then subsequently acquires the characteristics of a medical device by, say, monitoring heartbeat and automatically notifying the user’s clinician of episodes.

A full discussion of what is and what isn’t a medical device – and indeed what will become a medical device under the MDR[3], which extends both the definition and raises the Class of many categories of device – is well beyond this blog, so thankfully the MHRA has produced an excellent short document summarising the position. They also offer a service to advise on close calls – if your proposal looks to be one such, you really should get it checked by the MHRA before submitting your proposal, and say you have in the proposal, and the result. The worst possible thing is to ignore it as, as a rule of thumb, a cost of about £50k and a delay of 6 months in implementation (though these are only indicative – figures vary widely depending on the device) will result if it subsequently emerges that it is. At the very least, recognise it as a risk.

Answer the question fully
If you have thought through your project proposal fully, you should have decided, for example, on the methodology to use in project management, broken out your work packages, and completed a risk matrix. If you have, then put all this in – skimping for example on the risk matrix, not estimating probability and severity, in order to calculate possible impact, immediately gives the impression of poor potential project management.

Another common practice is the organisation that is so full of its own idea that it wants to repeat it in answer to any question where it can be sort-of fitted. Marks are scored for the right information answering the right question; everything else is wasting an opportunity to put other right information there to score more.

Not using the space provided fully is a dangerous practice as it suggests again that the proposal has not been properly thought through. Likewise if the question asks for the benefits you will receive from the funding and the benefits the taxpayer will receive, don’t merely tell the assessors how wonderful the project will be for you; not detailing why the taxpayer might want to fund it is unforgivable!  

And finally
There is nothing that irritates an assessor more than a proposal that has obviously not been proofread properly. The immediate conclusion that is (often unconsciously, and perhaps unfairly) drawn is that the proposing organisation will struggle to deliver the project if they cannot even communicate its key features clearly.

There are many potential sources of funding  - start by checking out Innovate UK and SBRI to see if there is a relevant competition to enter. Go into every funding application with conviction, and do your utmost to sell your product or service in the most impactful way you can. Knowing and acknowledging the risks shows you understand the market and gives confidence in your commercial acumen. That’s essential to converting an idea into reality.


[1] This relates to information concerning a data subject's racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, trade union activities, physical or mental health, sexual life, or details of criminal offences.

[2] Thus a device that currently meets the MDD requirements though not the MDR ones, would become illegal immediately the MDR comes fully into force.

[3] Note inclusion of the words “prediction” and “prognosis” in particular, that were not in the MDD definition.