Not understanding a couple of the suggested apps. Presume a simple description of bed boards would be:
List of all beds in a ward, each bed has patients details plus vital signs and other key information for the patient in the bed.
What is therapy outcomes measures?
I think you’re pretty much right with bed boards:
The non-digital equivalent looks like this, and although it did a decent enough job it is hard to place these boards in wards such that you correctly balance visibility of the board against confidentiality of the patients. When Caldicott 1 came out in the early 2000s this was one of the issues I remember it raised in my hospital.
Google says: “The Therapy Outcome Measure (TOM) allows professionals from many disciplines working in health, social care and education to describe the relative abilities and difficulties of a patient/client in the four domains of impairment, activity, participation and wellbeing in order to monitor changes over time.”
I guess an app for this would enable patients to record how they felt they were functioning according to various criteria, and for that to loop back to the clinician so they can see how effective the therapy has been. (and inevitably there’s the ‘dashboard commissioners view’ of how cost effectcive is this service).
The fundamental problem with the dearth of suitable apps is that there is not, and is never going to be, a commercial market for these apps - the market’s too small, the requirements are too heterogeneous, and there’s no ‘direct to patient’ marketing route.
This is exactly what happens when central NHS decisionmakers rely too much on ‘the market’ of commercial 3rd party software development for all their ‘innovation’. The ‘market’ is never going to produce much of what the NHS needs, we need some of these apps to be developed by the NHS and made available for free to the whole NHS.
I wonder if it would be more useful to enable the market?
Using the bed management as an example, the screen shot you provided shows a dashboard view of management data held within most Acute PAS systems. For a clinically focused dashboard I’d probably need access to data held in the EPR or Vital Signs app.
It’s not technically difficult to build these apps but access to the data is very difficult (unless we all start asking for the same API’s and use similar security models - most developers will probably say a REST+JSON resource API with OAuth2).
The Therapy Outcome Measure appears to be reporting on CarePlan - activities and goals. Wonder if we should encourage a common ‘nouns of healthcare’ language to aid understanding? (Nouns of health care = Resources Overview | Care Connect ?)
