Apps – potential comes with challenges

Apps provide a unique opportunity for better engagement between developers and clinicians, but many challenges must be addressed before they reach their potential, Ewan Davis says.

As chair of the BCS Primary Health Care Group, and founder of the Healthcare App Network for Development and Innovation, Davis is speaking about clinical apps at the BCS group’s annual conference at the end of this month.

“The app paradigm provides a unique opportunity for engagement between the developer community and front line clinical community, but in order to maximise the potential there are some challenges to be addressed,” he told eHealth Insider.

Davis described apps as the “flavour of the month” and believes they have significant potential, but that there is a danger of them being over-hyped.

“They have a lot to offer us, but like all of these things, they are not a magic bullet to all the problems we have had with health IT.”

The major benefit of apps is that they are very cheap and quick to develop. This encourages innovation as if something does not work, the developer can write it off, he said.

They are particularly useful for meeting niche requirements, allowing a “bright young doctor” in a specialist department to develop something useful for themselves and colleagues.

Davis said this encourages communication between developers and front line health workers.

Primary care systems developed in this way when innovative doctors went out and bought computers and developed programmes that would help them run their practice.

“It results in a meaningful engagement with developers and clinicians so each understands each other’s domain enough to actually do something useful,” he said.

“That’s why GP computing has been the success it’s been, because of engagement with the development community and the GP community. That hasn’t happened outside the GP community to anything like the same extent.”

Apps by their nature are designed to do a small number of things well. This means if their use is going to expand, they must interoperate.

“That’s where it starts to get more difficult because apps tend to be rather siloed,” he explained.

Davis said there is a lot of work going on to address these issues, such as the Smart Platforms initiative, funded by the US government, which provides a platform for apps to interoperate.

He believes an ecosystem must be created where apps can work together and share data. This would act as an electronic medical record repository, where data would be stored and others apps could find it.

Davis acknowledged that information governance will always be an issue, but argued that the patient-facing component of apps can help to overcome these issues as patients can be asked directly if they want their information shared and in what circumstances.

Davis said the app approach fits with the government policy of open data, open systems and transparency and there are groups like HANDI supporting people at a grass roots level.

However, he believes some level of co-ordination and funding is needed from the centre and the government has a particular role to play in making it easier for small innovative companies to enter the NHS IT market.

Trusts will likely need incentives to invest in these sorts of solutions and a pooling of expertise will be needed to support those people making procurement decisions to invest in new technologies, he added.

The BCS PHCSG 32nd AGM and Annual Conference is being held on 27 – 28 September at Ettington Park Hotel, Stratford-upon-Avon.