The healthcare industry is increasingly turning to mobile solutions largely because so many of its workers are on the move – doctors and nurses roam hospital floors, nurses and home care workers are on the road.
A Nova Scotia software company that specializes in healthcare solutions has come up with an improved version of its mobile app that tracks patient treatment.
Health Outcomes Worldwide (HOW) said this week it has a new version of its how2track mobile app for Apple iPad and Android devices.
How2trak is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution with three modules: wound care, diabetes and surgical site infections.
Initially the new mobile app will only be for wound care.
First developed as a PC application, how2trak lets health care staff enter data about a medical condition, search a database of information, enter photos of wounds for comparison with a database of other images and reminds healthcare workers to follow medical best practices
“We’re dramatically improving healing times and reducing costs,” Corrine McIsaac, president and founder of HOW, said in an interview.
The company is based in New Waterford, N.S.
About half of the treatments home care workers deal with are wounds, she said, so a mobile version of the app will increase care, decrease the pain of patients and speed healing – and the latter should reduce medical costs.
The goal, she said, is to deliver evidence-based care.
For security the company offers dual encryption with hashing of sensitive data such as account passwords and patient-identifiable data. Data is also kept in two data centres.
The new mobile app improves on the older one because it allows users to store data when they are out of range of a wireless Internet connection and then forward it later.
The app has multiple touch screens that make data entry easier than typing on a laptop, a searchable product page to quickly find products by name or type and the ability to upload photos to patient records.
Meanwhile the desktop version has added a form builder that makes any paper form electronic, a section for notes, and realtime access to wound size and depth graphs.
The cost of how2trak depends on the number of subscribers. On average institutions are paying $20 per user per month, McIsacc said. The more users the more the price drops.
