JointPRO – facing the Imperial Dragons & winning awards

A huge congratulations is in order to the team at the MSk Lab who have been working on developing Joint Pro and putting in many hours to hone their presentations and pitches – which has really paid off. Within the space of a couple of weeks, Joint PRO has won two awards to continue developing the system ready for launch in the next couple of weeks.

Based on the success of social media in revolutionising the uploading and sharing of information, we have developed JointPRO, a remote web-based tool that electronically captures joint-specific patient reported outcomes (PROs), giving feedback to the patient, and relaying real-time information to the care provider.

Patients’ self-reported health will be evaluated using validated PRO instruments (Oxford Scores and EQ5D), in addition to a novel PRO instrument that has been developed in our lab. The latter is unique in allowing each patient’s personal aspirations to determine the success or otherwise of an intervention.

JointPRO will encourage patients to login and score their self-reported health at regular intervals, pre- and post-operatively, so that changes in PROs over time may be reliably assessed. This quantifiable patient-reported information will be accessible in real-time to consented patients, clinicians and researchers.

JointPRO will provide clinicians with a valuable tool to support clinical decision-making and actively monitor their patients. Critically, it obviates the need for unnecessary clinic appointments, enabling targeted patient reviews. This is more convenient for the patient, yet maintains adequate surveillance at a time when the economic realities force clinical commissioning groups to restrict outpatient appointments.

Importantly, linking patient and clinical outcome data will allow researchers to explore factors influencing clinical effectiveness, thus informing future treatment, while continuous remote data collection enables rapid audit of any element of the care pathway.

Facing the Imperial Dragons:

On the 6th November 2013, Ms Emily Moore and Dr Gareth Jones, were one of many innovative groups to present to the Imperial Dragons comprising of: Professor Lord Ara Darzi (Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and Chair of Imperial College Health Partners), Kevin Jarrold (Chief Information Office at Imperial College NHS Trust), Peter Hames (CEO and co-founder of Sleepio), Tim Bunting (General Partner of Balderton), Tim Kelsey (first National Director for Patients and Information in the NHS). Emily was given four minutes to present the pitch, followed by two minutes interrogation to win funding from the “Dragons Den Competition for Apps” which aims to catalyse ideas from Imperial College staff about how mHealth (Mobile Health) could be used to improve patient care and outcomes. The competition was opened up to everyone from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Imperial College London.

Imperial Innovations Functional Rehabilitation Funding Call:

The shortlisted applications across the AHSCs were reviewed in a panel meeting consisting of representatives of the AHSC TTOs, MIMIT and ARUK: 5 applications were reviewed in total. The panel scored each application out of 10 taking into consideration the following: how the project addressed the call, originality, the scientific rationale and feasibility of the project, the clinical need and translational outcomes.

Following a detailed discussion on each application, it was confirmed that JointPRO was successfully awarded funding. The competition was extremely tight and the panel was impressed with the quality of all the applications.

As already mentioned JointPRO will be launching soon, so keep an eye out at: www.jointpro.co.uk

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *