Mobile and app news in brief

This month's round-up of mobile and app news includes an award for an imaging app that allows medical staff to use their own mobiles to send images, guidance for diabetes care in hospital, and a thoughtful project to help children with asthma stay in school.  

Clinical imaging app wins award

A mobile app developed by Stormnet Media in conjunction with University Hospital Birmingham has won an award for innovation from the West Midlands Academic Health Science Network. The clinical imaging app is designed to enable medical teams and doctors to send clinical images from their mobiles, using a secure network, and have them uploaded to their hospital’s image management system.

Ian Stainton, managing director of Stormnet Media, said: “We have worked closely with University Hospital Birmingham and its IT department to test the app, to make sure it delivers the required security. It’s also been independently destruction tested by external security experts.”

Southampton clinicians develop standards for diabetes care

Clinicians in Southampton have developed standards to improve the care of patients with diabetes while they are in hospital. The processes include adding a ‘ThinkGlucose’ logo to patient status boards, making sure that a foot disease assessment is performed, and that insulin or oral diabetes medication is given at mealtimes.

Dr Mayank Patel, lead consultant in diabetes at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, said diabetes management was one of many areas competing for resources in trusts, but one in which IT could really help, as it could be used to support both staff training and patient management through the use of apps such as DiAppBetes, which he developed with critical care colleague Dr Sanjay Gupta.

Medical School project helps children with asthma stay in school

Researchers at Brighton and Sussex Medical School have worked with Brighton and Hove Council on an app that tracks school absences due to asthma-related illness and delivers tailored advice to families to improve treatment and keep children in the classroom.

The app, called Studybugs, enables parents to inform a school if their child is unwell. It then prompts them to provide more information about whether the illness was caused by asthma symptoms. This enables analysis of the causes of the problem, and tailored advice for preventing it. Participation in the project is free for parents and schools.

iMDsoft introduces smart alerts for sepsis and AKI

IMDsoft has added smart alerts for sepsis and AKI, based on NICE guidelines, to its MetaVision SafeTrack product, a mobile electronic observations system, which is being implemented at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust. Lars-Oluf Nielsen, chief executive of the company, said the innovations would support patient safety and help hospitals spot patients with potentially lethal conditions in time to prioritise their care.

IMS Health puts Big Data Factory in cloud

IMS Health has chosen Cloudera Enterprise for its Big Data Factory, a cloud-based platform that is used by life sciences and healthcare clients for data processing, management, modelling and analysis. The set-up will use the Hadoop distributed file system to improve the speed and scalability of the Big Data Factory offer.