Industry news in brief

The latest Digital Health News industry roundup features the formation of Visiba Care’s UK Advisory Board, recognition for ORCHA and Royal Perth Hospital in Australia introducing electronic prescriptions.

Visiba Care announce formation of UK Advisory Board

Swedish virtual care platform provider, Visiba Care, has announced the appointment of their UK advisory board. The board has been created to provide expert insight, intelligence and knowledge and to ensure Visiba Care can respond to the needs of the UK’s current and future healthcare system.

Chaired by Mike Bell, chair of Croydon Health Services NHS Trust and Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, the board brings together experts from across the healthcare sector.

Current members of the advisory board include:

• Jake Arnold-Forster, co-founder at Carradale Futures
• Dr Nav Chana, national PCH clinical director at the National Association of Primary Care (NAPC)
• Dr Marc Farr, chief analytical officer at East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust
• Martin Godfrey, general practitioner and governing body member at Lambeth Clinical Commissioning Group

Liverpool City Region shows appetite for supporting healthtech start-ups

Lorna Green, CEO of LYVA Labs, a non-profit organisation that supports early-stage healthtech start-ups in the Liverpool City Region, has highlighted the area’s appetite for supporting budding start-ups in the healthtech space and the importance of giving them support in funding and beyond.

In January of this year, LYVA Labs secured its first allocation of funding of £7.5million from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority – five million to ringfence into start-ups and 2.5million to fund the team and expert advisors.

The company works with entrepreneurs and businesses that are at the ‘idea stage’ of their business journey, helping them access the funding and resources needed to progress a concept to a functioning product or service.

Green said: “By combining key fields of business and innovation that would otherwise be split into industry-focused groups, LYVA Labs is able to capitalise on the resources and expertise across various industries, such as Health and Life Sciences, Digital and Creative, Advanced Manufacturing and Professional Services.”

She also stressed in her article that the future of healthcare relies on innovation and collaboration and that the next stage for successful healthcare innovation is getting solutions distributed across the healthcare system to ensure all patients can access the treatment they needed.

New health data metrics accessible through Fitbit API to support researchers

Fitbit is making more health data metrics accessible through its open application programming interface (API) to help support researchers.

The metrics now available to researchers and other partners include bloody oxygen saturation (SpO2), breathing rate, heart rate variability (HRV) and sleep logs (as captured through device).

These metrics are in addition to certain metrics which were already available, relating to activity, body fat and weight, heart rate, sleep and food logging.

The open Fitbit API provides continuous access to key Fitbit health data metrics, giving researchers the potential to understand more about patient’s real-time health and to advance critical health-based research.

By making additional metrics accessible, the hope is to support health partners with extra data that can be used within research to support disease detection, management and prevention.

Two organisations whose researchers are already using health data metrics from Fitbit’s open API are King’s College London and Health Drive Digital.

ORCHA placed seventh on list of UK’s most innovative Healthtech companies

The Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps (ORCHA) has been placed at number seven on a list of the top 50 healthtech companies in the UK.

The ranking, compiled by technology magazine Business Cloud, follows a succession of other award wins in recent months for ORCHA and its founder Liz Ashall-Payne, including Ashall-Payne scooping Entrepreneur of the Year at the Women in IT Awards.

Commenting on her company’s inclusion in the ranking, Ashall-Payne said: “Founding a healthtech start-up has been an incredible challenge and has taken immense resilience.

“To be where we are today, with a committed team of creative, motivated colleagues, is fantastic. Massive thanks to all those who voted for us to be in this prestigious ranking.”

NHS Forth Valley migrates to latest version of CCubs Solutions’ EDRMS

NHS Forth Valley has successfully completed a significant project to migrate to the latest version of CCube Solutions’ electronic document and record management system (EDRMS).

The project was important to the health board in both an operational and clinical sense as EDRMS has become the primary database for all patient information. It is heavily used on a daily basis by over 5,000 registered users and, to date, contains in excess of 13.5million documents for circa 1.2million patients.

NHS Forth Valley is a long term customer of CCube Solutions dating back 16 years. The upgrade project started during the Covid-19 pandemic and was recently completed.

Anne Fielding, EDRMS project team leader at NHS Forth Valley, said: “Covid obviously delayed our progress, but we’re now fully operational with version 4.

“We love the system – it’s so easy to use, offers various tools for managing documents and the reliability and speed of presenting larger documents via a browser is better.  CCube Solutions has also been very responsive to tailoring EDRMS to how we want to work.”

To complete the EDRMS update to version 4, all data had to be migrated to fit the new platform architecture which is fully web-based, supporting documentation written users trained and some IT infrastructure upgraded.

The new version delivers a variety of benefits, including role-based access, different views of the record now offered, extensive systems integration and interoperability capabilities, and expanded scanning capacity.

Royal Perth Hospital becomes first to offer patients electronic prescriptions in Australia

Royal Perth Hospital has become the first public hospital in Australia to offer its patients the chance to obtain electronic prescriptions that can be dispensed at community pharmacies.

The service, part of a joint project between Royal Perth Hospital, WA Health Support Services and the Australian Digital Health Agency, will be rolled out to all specialties at the hospital following an initial 12-week trial in haematology, immunology, anaesthesia and pain medicine, and gastroenterology and liver outpatient clinics.

Amanda Cattermole, CEO at the Australian Digital Health Agency, said: “This is a fabulous development for hospital outpatients to make their lives a little easier upon leaving hospital with proven digital technology that will further enhance the reputation of Western Australia’s world-class health system.

“At the end of the Royal Perth Hospital trial, there will be a full-scale evaluation involving feedback from patients, clinicians and pharmacists to help inform further rollout plans for WA Health.”

During the trial, registered prescribers can generate an electronic prescription when needed for their patients, who will then receive an SMS or email message with a token they can either present in person or forward electronically to their local pharmacy to receive supply of their medicine.

The ability of healthcare providers to generate an electronic prescription supports consumer expectations and a choice between paper prescriptions and electronic formats where appropriate, bringing hospital healthcare into the digital health landscape.