CW+ Chelsea and Westminster Hospital
From its base at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, CW+ is a charity that exists to make care better for patients and their families.
“We are truly delighted with the app. As a clinician it has been brilliant to be able to use this in situ with patients as it’s quick and easy to download and prescribe exercises. It making a real difference to the patient and therapist experience. Thanks for all your hard work and dedication to this project.”
Hayley Fay
Senior Occupational Therapist, Hand Therapy Department, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Before we landed
CW+ invests in financially sustainable innovations, facilities and technologies that improve clinical outcomes for patients at Chelsea and Westminster and beyond. One such project is to support its 4,600 patients recuperating from hand trauma or surgery each year.
The challenge we were set
CW+ commissioned IE to build a hand therapy app, to enable healthcare professionals to prescribe a programme of hand exercises appropriate to the individual to aid recovery – reducing the need for face-to-face appointments and improving patient outcomes. Importantly, the app needed to be based on reusable components, providing a framework for future apps to be built more efficiently.
The difference we made
IE Digital built a rapid prototype using Telerik, before evolving the product in the build phase. This enabled CW+ to quickly see what they were getting, give feedback and make changes as needed.
The app features a library of over 100 new instructional videos showing how to perform hand exercises specific to a person’s hand injury. The clinician uses an intuitive ‘favourites’ system to prescribe relevant content, which is supplemented with notes for each patient. Built-in reminders help patients meet their recommended exercise times and frequency.
IE took care to build in efficiencies so that, where possible, components are reusable for future CW+ apps. We built versions of the app for both iOS and Android devices.
Although the project is primarily aimed at supporting staff and patients at Chelsea and Westminster, CW+ intends to keep it open to help other areas of the health service.
