'Bridging the GApp': An exploration of App development in the health care sector

'Bridging the GApp‘: An exploration of App development in the health care sector This paper explores an on-going project undertaken jointly by an Education academic at Kingston University and physicians from the Royal Marsden Hospital, London. The purpose of the project is the development of Apps designed for use on a personal mobile device by health care professionals, with the goal of improving patient safety. These include the ‟Opioid App”, which effectively calculates correct opioid dosages and allows easy navigation through guidelines, the ‟Handover App” which assists healthcare professionals whose work pattern involves shifts, shift changes and the handing over of care and responsibility for their patients, and the ‟Guidelines App” making available the very latest guidelines for the management of specific types of cancer. The challenge in relation to the development of the apps is not writing the code but thorough knowledge of how the healthcare sector functions in order to address the predicaments and frustrations faced by these professionals in the workplace. It is essential that the gap between code writing and healthcare practices is bridged in order to effectively apply the technology, and this translation process represents a specialised role in any successful software development. In this paper the perspective of the Kingston academic involved in 'bridging the gap‘ is presented: the different apps are briefly described, the process of the knowledge transfer between healthcare professionals and code writers is explored, and findings from an initial evaluation of the project are presented.