How are you? is very well with award win

Cambridge Healthcare has won HealthInvestor’s Innovation Award for its smartphone enabled web portal that gives patients control of their personal medical records.

'How are you?' was set-up by Dawson King in his attic in April 2011 and has been developed in partnership with the NHS Midlands and East, NHS Connecting for Health and NHS Choices.

The portal has 343 health professionals and 7,432 patients registered across eight regions and is also available in the form of an iPhone application available on iTunes. An Android version is in development.

King, who is a member of the East of England’s NHS Innovation Council, told eHealth Insider that the portal has been designed to “improve outcomes by creating access to better, more integrated care as well as to enable effective working of professional across provider boundaries.”

“We are trying to enable people to be able to have the amount of control and responsibility they want for their long-term condition, to help people to adapt to life with their conditions and to take control of their care,” he said.

The system has secured approval for hosting within the NHS’s N3 data network and Dawson has already met with health secretary Andrew Lansley, to discuss the record and its free access to patients and practitioners in the NHS.

At the moment, it generates revenues through the international licensing of its technologies, although it has raised venture capital funding and is talking to potential partners with a view to developing a similar product for patients in New Zealand, Canada, Hong Kong and China.

The How are you? portal is also integrated with Microsoft’s HealthVault PHR platform, which allows health and fitness data to be transferred from more than 80 devices, such as heart rate watches and blood pressure monitors.

An application store will go-live this month, to showcase both apps and devices that are compatible with the health record.

King said that the company is currently in the process of “trialling a workforce communication and patient management feature” which will include secure clinical document storage, knowledge management, patient workflow and full audit trail.

“We want to continue to enable policy-makers, clinicians and managers to achieve closer integration of care within the NHS, improving the quality of care for patients and reducing costs through the use of technology to support more joined-up and efficient services,” he said.