Home News EHI Here's a really NICE app

[Rob Dyke]

From EHI: 

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has created an app to give healthcare professionals “quick and easy” access to its recommendations and guidance.
The app works on Android Smartphones, Apple iPhones and iPod touches running iOS 4.3 and above. Users have been able to download the app from Apple’s iStore and the Android market since yesterday (20 March).

NICE website app page

Of course, OHC-UK/oss-uk-health got there first by some months. :)

Anyone planning a side-by-side comparison?

[Ross Jones]

Always likely to happen, and it _does_ look very pretty.  I guess that's what comes from having a budget and control of the data though ;) I believe the original version was written by Tim Duckett (twitter.com/timd) who is an awesome guy based, if I recall correctly, in Sheffield.  At least that is where he organised the Interesting North conference a couple of years ago.

NICE have an API now (http://api.nice.org.uk/), and I was hoping to get official access to that so that we didn't have to rely on fragile scraping, but I'm not holding my breath.

Either way I don't think we'll stop with the simple OSS version, I'm sure that with a bit more time and hopefully access to the API we can provide a faster solution even if not yet a prettier one - unless NICE can be persuaded to open up the source code to allow for external contributions.

Ross.

[VJ]

The NICE app is about "Guidance"

Ours is clinical and about Clinical Guidelines.

No overlap

[Rob Dyke]

Thanks for marking the distinction in content / audience VJ.

Ross notes an API ... any thoughts about combining Guidance and Clinical Guiddelines?

[VJ]

Hi Rob,

Actually my intent is the "One Ring".
An app that shows you all available Clinical Guidelines regardless of Publisher, be that NICE, SIGN, the Royal Colleges... from a single access and search app.

I've renamed it Nice, as opposed to NICE as a nod to this.

I had not planned to include managerial content on how to implement guidance as this new app does.

If you look at their app, you will note it is a 12+Mb download. They may have used the API to develop but the app doesn't seem to dynamically hook back into it.
I haven't investigated the binary to check verify this.

It's end of year at the moment so paid work is busy. I'll try to implement a few quick things but will only really get back to it mid April.

Whilst we're 5,000+ installations ahead on Android, we're still nowhere with convincing Apple to let us play.

VJ
Dr V J Joshi

[VJ]

Hi all,

Playing with the NICE app more, I see it is the sum total of their publications and that Clinical Guidelines are included.

To be honest, I find the flowchart algorithms in the PDF much easier to follow, though their app definitely is more practical on the average screen sizes. As an improvement, it needs to be able to jump to the subsections of each chapter.

I think, since they have categorisation, bookmarks and a more formal search, it probably surpasses our app and only needs for them to offer links to their PDFs.

The only way to avoid the coup de grace would be to implement the grand unification and quickly.

My2cent,
VJ