Mersey Burns App wins EHI Awards 2013

An app that enables doctors to quickly and accurately assess the extent of a burn and so deliver the best possible treatment to patients has emerged as the overall winner of the EHI Awards 2013 in association with CGI.

The Mersey Burns App was developed by a PhD student, Chris Seaton, and two plastic surgeons at St Helen’s and Knowsley NHS Trust, Rowan Pritchard-Jones and Professor Paul McArthur, with further support from the Knowsley Health Informatics Service.

Traditionally, doctors sketch a burn on paper to assess its extent and decide what fluids to give to a patient. The app enables them to shade the area of a burn on a plan of the human body, does the fluid calculations for them, and collects patient details that can be forwarded to a specialist unit.

The app is also the first UK healthcare app to carry a CE mark from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency; making it the first, regulated phone app in the UK.

EHI director Linda Davidson said: “Improving the working lives of their clinical colleagues and helping them to improve the care they deliver to patients is what motivates the healthcare IT teams and the suppliers who enter the EHI Awards each year.

“The Mersey Burns App is a wonderful example of how modern technology can be used to make care better and faster, and so is a very fitting winner of this year’s awards. We would like to congratulate the team behind it, and the teams behind all the other inspiring entries that we received this year.”

The black tie dinner for the EHI Awards 2013 in association with CGI was held last night at The Roundhouse in London, with 12 winners announced by compere Rory Bremner before the final announcement was made.

The Healthcare IT Champion of the Year award, which is decided by the readers of EHI, went to Kemi Adenubi, the GPSoC programme director at the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

A new personal award, the CCIO award for clinical informatics leadership, went to Dr Rhidian Bramley, the CCIO of The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, which also won a number of categories.

The ten category award winners were:

Best use of IT to support clinical treatment and care: Hyper-acute online TIA (HOT-TIA) referral form: Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

Best use of IT to support healthcare business efficiency: New electronic medical records system: Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Best use of social media in healthcare: Deepening the use of online patient feedback: Patient Opinion, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust

Excellence in healthcare business intelligence: Referral Learning Tool: Brighton and Hove Integrated Care Service

Healthcare IT product innovation: Sleepio: Sleepio

Best use of IT to promote patient safety: Radiology Result Acknowledgment Project: The Christie NHS Foundation Trust

Excellence in major healthcare IT development: Key Information Summary: NHS National Services Scotland

Excellence in mobile healthcare: Mersey Burns App: St Helens and Knowsley Health Informatics Service

Innovation in Healthcare Integration and Interoperability: System TDM: Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust

Outstanding work in healthcare imaging informatics: The NHS PACS web portal: Christie NHS Foundation Trust and former NHS Northwest.

Many of the winners and runners-up in this year’s EHI Awards will be talking about their work at EHI Live 2013, in the Awards Theatre sponsored by CGI. The overall winner of this year’s awards, the Mersey Burns App, will be at the show, in the Handi Health Apps zone. The winner of the CCIO award for clinical informatics leadership, Dr Rhidian Bramley, will be co-chairing the CCIO Leaders Network Annual Conference that is co-located with EHI Live for the second year. This year’s conference is free for all visitors to attend.