Bringing the best of mobile technology to Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust

We’re really excited to announce that we’ve agreed a five year partnership with Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, helping them make the most of the opportunity for mobile clinical applications to improve care. This is now our second NHS partnership for clinical apps, following a similar partnershipwe announced last month with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.

Over the last two years, the Trust has moved from paper to electronic patient records, and mobile technology is the natural next stage of this work. By giving clinicians access to cutting-edge healthcare apps that link to electronic patient records, they’ll be able to access information on the move, react quickly in response to changing patient needs, and ultimately provide even better care.

We’ll be working with the Trust to deploy our clinical app, Streams, which supports clinicians in caring for patients at risk of deterioration, particularly with conditions where early intervention can make all the difference. Like breaking news alerts on a mobile phone, the technology will notify nurses and doctors immediately when test results show a patient is at risk of becoming seriously ill. It will also enable clinicians at the Trust to securely assign and communicate about clinical tasks, and give them the information they need to make diagnoses and decisions.

This partnership builds on a relationship between the Trust, Imperial College, and DeepMind. The task management features in Streams are underpinned by a world class programme of widely published research and early product development carried out at Imperial College London and the Trust, as part of an app called Hark co-founded by Lord Ara Darzi. Using simulated data, Hark was found to improve the quality of transfer of information between staff and was rated by users as more effective and efficient, and less distracting than pagers [www.jmir.org/2016/4/e79/]. Hark became part of DeepMind in early 2016.

As in our partnership with the Royal Free, we’re also implementing state-of-the-art open and interoperable standards, via what’s known as a FHIR API. This will allow the Trust to easily, securely and consistently integrate other apps that could improve care, whether developed by third parties or innovators within the Trust. Our partners at Imperial are excited about the potential for a wide range of apps to improve care, and we’re delighted to be working with them to make this possible.

Our hope is that the infrastructure and apps we’re building not only help improve care in the short term, but also make it much easier for Trusts to bring new innovations to the clinical frontlines in future.