Pioneering health app launches tool to help achieve digital healthcare vision for self care

mHealth pioneer, Health Fabric, is helping deliver the vision of patient-centred digital health by launching the Health Fabric Store where clinicians and commissioners can create, share and recommend care plans with their patients and reap the potential benefits of digitally-driven self-care.

Launched at the 2015 Commissioning Show, the store will help patients, carers and healthcare providers to improve care and reduce the need to use health and care services – part of the NHS’ vision for personalised health and care, and which could go some way towards achieving Tim Kelsey’s ambitious vision of using IT to help save the NHS 13.7billion a year.

“Long-term health conditions now eat up almost three quarters of the health service budget,” said Satnam Bains, chief executive officer of Health Fabric, who shared his vision for a patient-centric digital ecosystem at the event.

“At the same time, many people want to be more involved with their own care. This technology bridges the gap between patient and provider by using clinically-relevant care plans and translating them into patient-centric healthcare information and activities.”

The need for better self care was a central theme to the NHS’ Five Year Forward View; the cost of chronic conditions is expected to cost £5billion per year by 2018. By providing patients with clinically-verified care plans created by healthcare providers, the Health Fabric Store helps to address this by giving patients the knowledge, skills and capabilities they need to manage their own care and symptoms – a key ambition for NHS digital health.

Care plans can be created in the Health Fabric Store by healthcare providers, or accessed from a library of existing plans. These can then be personalised to meet the patient’s individual needs, and so help deliver the benefits of greater self care and patient empowerment, such as reduced use of health services, greater patient satisfaction, better medication adherence, and improved clinical outcomes.

All of the plans available have goals, actions and supportive information to help the patients manage long-term conditions such as diabetes and COPD. These plans are then translated into a care diary, a set of reminders and other essential data and activities that the patient and clinician can use together to help better manage their care. MyHealthFabric can also integrate with the person’s health record, with the organisation already an accredited partner of major GP system supplier EMIS.

Accessible by patients through the MyHealthFabric app, which can be downloaded via Google Play and iTunes and is available on NHS apps, the store is open to organisations that have developed care plans that work for patients and professionals alike, such as health and care charities, clinical commissioning groups, and bodies looking to harness technology to develop new models of care.

This is the latest in a series of Health Fabric developments that have seen them covered in the recent Connected Health report from the Deloitte Centre of Health Solutions. Health Fabric was chosen as one of 10 Department of Health-supported apps in 2013, and is working with clinicians and commissioners across the country on realising the vision of a patient-centred digital health ecosystem that will enable the behaviour change essential for the future of NHS care provision.