Coming Out
The team has come to realize that in order to continue the objectives this blog is to meet, it must come clean. Up to this point, information regarding our client and project has been, to a point, redacted. This is a practice that will hinder rather than help from this point on.
Our Client: Project Manager for MINAP
The Myocardial Ischaemia National Audit Project (MINAP) investigates the management of heart attacks. Participating hospitals and ambulance services are to provide a record of their management practices. These records are then compared to national and international clinical standards. The National Institute of Cardiovascular Outcomes Research (NICOR) is a partnership of clinicians, IT experts, analysts, academics and managers. Its mission is to “provide information to improve heart disease patients’ quality of care and outcomes”. Using different audits, MINAP being one of them, NICOR aims to provide the NHS, government and regulatory bodies real world data to be used in patient care. The team’s primary point of contact is the Project Manager for MINAP, who we have referred to as the ‘client’ in previous posts.
Our Project: A mobile solution
Participating facilities are requested to enter all patients with suspected heart attack. Data is collected by nurses and other clinical audit staff and entered in a dedicated web application. This web application collects all patient data, from demographics to diagnosis and release information. As it stands, the web application contains a 130 field dataset that is updated every two years (latest revision, June 2013). The data is then validated against a set of rules which include, but are not limited to, value range checks, date range checks, data type checks and encryption rules. Once completed, records are stored on MINAP’s Domino server. A further look into the web application will be posted in a later post.
The app dev team has been tasked to produce a mobile application that will serve as a starting point for the data capture process, thus relieving clinicians of some of the burden of data entry. This project will retain the major functionality of the web application while working with a slightly reduced dataset. Validation and storage must be taken into account, as well as maintaining a semblance of familiarity for the current user base. The target platform for this mobile solution is the Android OS for smartphones.
