Doctors with iPads could transform hospital care

Modern medicine creates mountains of data – a suite of iPad apps called Medopad aims to integrate it all and place it in the palm of a doctor's hand

HOSPITALS are packed full of valuable information about patients but doctors often struggle to use it effectively. A London-based start-up wants to change all that with a new suite of iPad apps called Medopad.

The idea is to link up every data-making system and machine in a hospital to a central service which can deliver a patient's collated records – from historical medical files to X-ray and MRI scans – at the touch of a doctor's iPad.

A number of bespoke Medopad apps help doctors manipulate and utilise this data. For example, one app broadcasts the readings from a patient's heart monitor to their doctor's iPad screen, so a check-up can be carried out from anywhere in the hospital building. Another app uses voice-recognition to let doctors create written notes on patients just by speaking.

"We said let's just build tiny bridges and data-mine what we need for the app to do what it needs to do," says Medopad CEO Rashid Shahidi.

For BMI Healthcare, the UK's largest private healthcare provider, Medopad could be about to transform how their doctors work. BMI has been piloting the software and testing integration with its hospitals' existing databases and is now deciding whether to roll it out for use with actual patients. "It's intuitive, and it kind of works the way doctors think," says group medical director, Mark Ferreira.

With Medopad in place, doctors will be able to refer cases to one another for a second opinion from within the app suite. Photos of a patient's visible symptoms can be taken using an iPad and shared, for example. Another Medopad app features integration with the Google Glass headset, which allows up to five clinicians to collaborate in real time, take pictures and share them, and access a patient's records simultaneously. A pathology app can even do some analytical work for doctors, with abnormal blood-test results flagged automatically.

The system has a number of security features. For example, it can be set up so that when a doctor's device physically leaves the hospital network, patient data will no longer be available on it.

Both doctors and patients should benefit from this kind of system, says Stevan Wing, who co-hosts a podcast on medical apps called The Digital Doctor. "If you increase the doctor's information as well as their ability to share it with patients and make joint decisions, then I think the quality of care must improve," he says.

Charles Lowe, president of the Telemedicine and eHealth section at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, has been following Medopad's progress. "It's going to speed up treatment," he says.

Others worry that Medopad's impact will not be of universal benefit. Carl Reynolds, CEO of Open Health Care UK, would prefer it if more software developers were commissioned to work with hospital data. That would mean that apps viewable on multiple devices could be created and that hospitals wouldn't have to buy into a single platform. Medopad will cost about £50 to £90 per month per user for a hospital to license.

Reynolds has created an open-source Electronic Clinical Infections Database that is being used at University College London Hospitals. But support for such initiatives is often lacking. "By embracing things like web technologies and existing, established open standards we could drive down our costs, improve interoperability and be in a much better place," he says
Newscientist.com