by Kevin Bambury | Feb 2, 2017 | News
Killarney, February 7th 2017: Irish Medical Device Company, Portable Medical Technology, has finalized a partnership with the European Oncology Nursing Society to make it’s flagship product, ONCOassist available to over 20,000 oncology nurses throughout Europe.
ONCOassist is a CE approved decision support application for oncology professionals. It offers oncology nurses and doctors easy access to the decision support tools and information they need via smartphone and tablet application. It is one of the first apps on the market to come with the required regulatory approval enabling it to be used in a hospital setting.
ONCOassist Co-founder Kevin Bambury commenting on the agreement said “ONCOassist’s suite of CE approved decision support tools is used on a daily basis by medical oncologists globally, and through this new agreement with the European Oncology Nursing Society we will expand our reach beyond medical oncologists to oncology nurses. These are very exciting times for ONCOassist.”
Erik Van Muilekom Past President of the European Oncology Nursing Society commented, “ONCOassist is a very useful tool for oncology nurses to use on a daily basis. ONCOassist offers tools like steroid and opiate equivalency converters which are extremely useful, and are now available in a safe, validated format on your smartphone or tablet.”
“There is currently no CE approved app like ONCOassist available for oncology professionals on the market. Decisions are made daily in hospitals around the world using apps that do not have the required regulatory approval. We are delighted to add the 20,000 EONS members to our growing fast growing user base.” said Co-Founder and CEO Eoin O’Carroll.
Welcoming the announcement MEP Sean Kelly stated, “This is an important development for innovative small business in Ireland, given the potential significance of this novel technology, the results of which include saving lives. I look forward to following the results of this innovative technology in the future. It is further evidence of the importance of innovative local companies to the long-term development of the regional economy and I’m delighted to see a partnership with a European Association. This cooperation is the very essence of what EU means and shows the benefit of being a Member of the EU. ”
ONCOassist is based in Killarney, Co. Kerry, it was founded by Kevin Bambury, Eoin O’Carroll and Dr. Richard Bambury who are all graduates of University College Cork. It has been funded by Enterprise Ireland and Chicago based VC Healthbox. It counts 9 out of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world amongst its customers and plans to grow its staff in early 2017.
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For more information, contact
Kevin Bambury – Portable Medical Technology
+ 353 21 731 9541
kevin@portablemedicaltechnology.com
About ONCOassist
ONCOassist is a clinical decision support app for oncology professionals. It contains all the clinical tools oncology professionals need in an easy to use and interactive format. It is offered as a member benefit by the European Society of Medical Oncology and has rapidly growing global userbase. ONCOassist was found in 2012 by Kevin Bambury, Eoin O’Carroll and Dr Richard Bambury.
About European Oncology Nursing Society
The European Oncology Nursing Society is a pan-European organisation dedicated to the support and development of cancer nurses.
Through our individual members and national societies we engage in projects to help nurses develop their skills, network with each other and raise the profile of cancer nursing across Europe. EONS is an independent, not-for-profit, voluntary organisation.
by Kevin Bambury | Apr 17, 2014 | News
Healthcare IT has long been dominated by large institutional players; these larger vendors had the capacity to withstand the long sales cycles and large up front development costs. However, they have not had the same incentives to integrate and partner as smaller companies. Much to frustration of healthcare providers, this has resulted in fragmented systems that are not interconnected.
Thankfully, things are about to change, a new slew of digital health start ups supported by health accelerators like Healthbox, Startup Health and Rockhealth have begun to gain market traction. You learn quickly as a start-up that you need to “collaborate or die.” . You can’t do everything, so work with the right people to create meaningful solutions to real problems. This is particularly relevant in the case of electronic health records communicating and interacting with decision support systems like ONCOassist.
Wouldn’t it be great if all of the ONCOassist’s calculations and prognostic algorithms were auto-populated providing instantaneous decision support information? A recent study by the West Institute estimated that software interoperability could save $30 billion annually.
In the long run interoperability seems like it makes sense to everyone; look at the success of the Apple and Android App Stores. This is an example of large company opening its doors to developers and entrepreneurs who create win-win situations. Customers get great niche products that add value to their existing platforms and both the developer and the hardware vendor share in the profits.
We haven’t seen this kind of success yet in digital health. Some of the newer electronic health records are beginning to open their platforms and invite integration. Examples of this include Medopad, Evolve and Dr. Chrono(who recently opened their API). Before the dream of interoperability can be realized there are numerous obstacles that need to be overcome, these include :
Regulatory
Apps vary in the dangers they pose to patients. The FDA and the EU stratify these into classification systems. The more danger your app poses the greater the overhead. This is a new space and regulatory agencies are just starting to get to grip with how to manage healthcare apps. Integration between apps and EHR is a whole other quagmire that needs to be managed. The FDA has recently announced that they will be issuing draft guidance on interoperability in the coming months.
Technical
Unlike the development of apps where you have 3 main players, Android, Windows and Apple, the electronic health record market is massively varied. There are numerous EHR vendors; some are built using old technologies which makes them more difficult to access. This provides a huge challenge for even the most well resourced development teams.
Commercial
Like everything in Healthcare a good business case is required before a customer will sign off on paying for the integration of an app with an existing system. Whereas the efficiency gains may seem obvious to us, they may not to be so obvious to the CFO of a large healthcare institution. Also, agreements must be made between the electronic health record provider and the app developer. Both parties must be incentivised correctly.
Although a hospital where all software systems speak to each other is inevitable, as a developer of a fully compliant medical app we see a number of challenges that must be overcome, collaboration between entrepreneurs, providers and vendors (both big and small) over the coming years is critical in overcoming these obstacles and giving the providers access to the systems they deserve.
Are you a healthcare provider,EHR or entrepreneur? Want to work together? Contact us, we want to hear from you.
by Kevin Bambury | Mar 17, 2014 | News
ONCOassist will integrate Clatterbridge chemo protocols as part of their cross-platform system.
March 17, 2014 – Portable Medical Technology and The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre NHS Foundation Trust have today announced an enterprise agreement which will see ONCOassist, Portable Medical Technology’s revolutionary CE approved software system being deployed as the main oncology decision support system used within Clatterbridge.
ONCOassist was launched in January of last year following extensive development involving oncologists, system developers and compliance personnel in Europe and the United States. Since launch ONCOassist has garnered growing acceptance amongst oncology professionals throughout the UK and Ireland. In August of this year, the platform was offered as an enterprise system. This enables individual trusts and institutions to integrate their guidelines and protocols and make them available throughout the trust in an easy to access and intuitive format across multiple mobile operating systems including iOS, Android and Windows.
The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, based in Wirral, Merseyside, have been working closely with the ONCOassist team over the past twelve months and an enterprise agreement was the logical next step. “After many discussions with Clatterbridge we realised that, as access to the most up to date version of their protocol library was so important, developing a guidelines and protocols engine that allows for the easy integration and updating of trust specific content that can interact with the many CE approved tools already present on the platform would be of huge benefit,” said Eoin O’Carroll of ONCOassist.
Thomas Poulter, Head of IM&T at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, said: “Having ONCOassist available in clinics and on the wards will save our clinicians time. The oncology nurses and clinicians will have access to all of the key oncology decision support information and tools they need. For example, our nurses often need to reference protocols or treatment algorithms when delivering chemotherapy treatment. ONCOassist makes it easy to do this.”
Jo Upton, Skin Cancer Advanced Nurse Practitioner at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, said: “A cancer nurse’s role is continually evolving to meet the needs of our patients. Important decisions relating to the management of treatment side-effects and the patient experience of their treatment are fast becoming central to the cancer nurse’s role, especially in the outpatient setting. It is essential that vital information to aid decision-making in practice is quick and easy to access. I have found that the ONCOassist app provides easy access to formulas and decision-support information in my day-to-day job.”
Kevin Bambury of ONCOassist said: “We are delighted to have The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre as the first NHS trust using our enterprise system. We look forward to working with them over the coming years as we continue to add features and functionality to the system”.
