After many months of hard work, we have an iPad application just made available in the Apple App Store.  The application is named Palliative Symptoms Survey and is a tool to be used by doctors and caregivers to assist in assessing how a palliative patient is feeling.

Palliative Symptoms Survey is an application based on the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Survey (ESAS-r) which was developed to assist in the assessment of nine symptoms that are common in palliative care patients: pain, tiredness, drowsiness, nausea, lack of appetite, depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, and wellbeing There is also a blank scale for patient-specific symptoms.

It is available now.

The Background

We were contacted by a Hospice clinic who was interested in taking advantage of the Apple iPad to provide better patient support.

Since patients are not always treated in a hospital but rather have regular visits by caregivers (nurses and nurse practitioners) who will work with doctors to make patient house calls.   Doctors drive to visit patients and it can be time consuming and not enough patients can be helped in a single day.

The Problem

Doctors in this clinic in particular are required to drive 50 miles to visit a single patient.  This leaves a lot of wasted time because of traveling.  Less time available means less patients receive attention that need attention.  The solution is hire more doctors or improve the process.

The Solution

The developed solution allows caregivers to assist patients to fill out a daily assessment of 9 symptoms which is relayed back to a central server.  This remote assessment allows doctors to almost instantly determine the daily condition of the patient.

The application is developed using Objective-C for the Apple iPad (all versions through iPad 3) and the user experience was created by a talented UK-based design firm.   All patient data is secure and discrete, adhering to HIPPA requirements.

Caregivers or patients are presented with a clean and simple user experience.  Choosing to survey their current well-being, diagramming their pain points or viewing the history of their daily progress.

The ESAS-r Survey is simple, easy sliders to relay back to the doctors.  Surveys are daily, update as often as needed.

The ESAS-r Diagram is just as simple, touch the area of pain in the diagram.

All data is transferred to back-end servers for later viewing by doctors or nurses.  Each iPad stores all assessments for all clients cared for in order to provide client history. The back-end system is developed using Ruby on Rails.

Conclusion

We are super excited with the release of this application.  We hope it makes the jobs of doctors and caregivers that much easier but more importantly helps to serves the patients requiring palliative care.

Please take the opportunity to look at this application in the Apple App Store and send any feedback or questions to rbazinet@stillriversoftware.com.   Companies who would like to discuss how we may provide iPad and iPhone or web application development services should also send inquiries to the above email address.