Mersey Burns App wins EHI Awards 2013

Published: 17-Oct-2013

Healthcare IT innovations come under the spotlight

An app that enables doctors to quickly and accurately assess the extent of a burn and so deliver the best possible treatment to patients has emerged as the overall winner of the EHI Awards 2013 .

The Mersey Burns App was developed by a PhD student, Chris Seaton, and two plastic surgeons from St Helen’s and Knowsley NHS Trust, Rowan Pritchard-Jones and Professor Paul McArthur, with support from the Knowsley Health Informatics Service.

Traditionally, doctors sketch a burn on paper to assess its extent and decide what fluids to give to a patient. The app enables them to shade the area of a burn on a plan of the human body, does the fluid calculations for them, and collects patient details that can be forwarded to a specialist unit.

The app is also the first UK healthcare app to carry a CE Mark from the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, making it the first regulated phone app in the UK.

EHI director, Linda Davidson, said: “Improving the working lives of their clinical colleagues and helping them to improve the care they deliver to patients is what motivates the healthcare IT teams and the suppliers who enter the EHI Awards each year.

“The Mersey Burns App is a wonderful example of how modern technology can be used to make care better and faster and so is a very fitting winner of this year’s awards. We would like to congratulate the team behind it and the teams behind all the other inspiring entries that we received this year.”

The black tie dinner for the EHI Awards 2013 in association with CGI was held at The Roundhouse in London last week, with 12 winners announced by celebrity host, Rory Bremner, before the final announcement was made.

The Healthcare IT Champion of the Year award, which is decided by the readers of EHI, went to Kemi Adenubi, the GPSoC programme director at the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

A new personal award, the CCIO Award for Clinical Informatics Leadership, went to Dr Rhidian Bramley, the chief clinical information officer at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, which also won a number of categories.

The ten category award winners were:

  • Best use of IT to support clinical treatment and care: Hyper-acute online TIA (HOT-TIA) referral form: Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
  • Best use of IT to support healthcare business efficiency: New electronic medical records system: Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
  • Best use of social media in healthcare: Deepening the use of online patient feedback: Patient Opinion, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust
  • Excellence in healthcare business intelligence: Referral Learning Tool: Brighton and Hove Integrated Care Service
  • Healthcare IT product innovation: Sleepio: Sleepio
  • Best use of IT to promote patient safety: Radiology Result Acknowledgment Project: The Christie NHS Foundation Trust
  • Excellence in major healthcare IT development: Key Information Summary: NHS National Services Scotland
  • Excellence in mobile healthcare: Mersey Burns App: St Helens and Knowsley Health Informatics Service
  • Innovation in Healthcare Integration and Interoperability: System TDM: Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust
  • Outstanding work in healthcare imaging informatics: The NHS PACS web portal: Christie NHS Foundation Trust and former NHS Northwest

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