HealthTrak is a platform for recording and analysis of Health Outcomes via Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs). It was designed to make it easier for orthopaedicians at Northumbria Foundation Trust to follow up post-operative patients.
Why it matters?
HealthTrak simplifies the collection of PROMs and is open source – cutting down on expensive license fees. It has the intelligence to automatically assign the appropriate PROMs assessments (& associated review dates) for a given orthropaedic procedure. Since it is open source, it can be extended and configured for other specialities and use in other clinical settings. We built HealthTrak for our clients at Northumbria Trust, Newcastle with funding from the NHS Digital. It currently consists of a website frontend and backend infrastructure.
Design Principles
- Simplify PROMs collection, reporting & analysis – specify the procedure & software does the rest.
- Built from scratch with input of clinicians from day 1. User centred – initially clinician focussed but easily extendable to lay audiences
- Open Source: can be modified by local trusts for use freely – Support for new specialities can be added
- Reduced long term software licensing costs! Code is open source to facilitate collaborative developments.
- Can work for large numbers of patients – uses technologies that Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix use
Enterprise-grade open source technology components - Open APIs and to avoid data lock in and to facilitate integration with other platforms and Electronic patient records
- Incorporate clinical informatics principles such as terminology standards (SNOMED-CT, ICD-10) and interoperability standards (HL7 FHIR).
Technologies
HealthTrak is built using modern Web 2.0 technologies and makes use of HTML5 and JavaScript for the user interface and is designed to run on all modern web browsers that support HTML5 and CSS3. The backend uses mature Java enterprise technologies (e.g. Spring, Hibernate, etc.). There is a clean separation of its backend layer from the user interface and persistence layers. This makes it easy for other 3rd party applications and other apps to plugin into the RESTful API service layer.
On going Development
We are working with Northumbria to make HealthTrak to adopt NHS Digital standards like SNOMED CT and HL7 FHIR. This on-going work will cover:
- Extending the functionality to capture operative notes – both as structured notes and unstructured notes.
- Support for SNOMED CT coded procedure details and operative notes.
- Expose underlying data to 3rd party applications using HL7 FHIR interfaces – integration with other primary care and secondary care systems.
- Creation of mobile applications that allow users (clinicians & patients) to complete PROMs assessments on tablets/phones.
