How NHS Healthcare Workers are Creating No-Code Apps to Fight Coronavirus on a Global Scale
In the battle against COVID-19, it’s easy to follow the strides and stumbles of presidents and prime ministers. But years from now, when the books are written and movies made, the best stories will be about those who put their lives at risk on the front lines of the pandemic.
As the dark clouds of COVID-19 gathered over Europe, Dr. Danny Wong, a hospital anaesthetist and researcher in the UK, knew it was time to act.
“I work at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals in London, and was anticipating the arrival of the pandemic in the UK.” Danny explains, “As healthcare workers performing intubations, I anticipated that we would be at high risk of contracting the virus ourselves.”
Due to the high viral load to which healthcare workers are exposed, it was theorized that they were at much greater risk. But proving it was another matter. Anyone who has tried to keep up with COVID-19 knows that solid data has been almost impossible to find. But when fighting a pandemic, data drives policy decisions and resource allocations that affect millions. Good data can ultimately mean the difference between life and death on a potentially massive scale.
Fellow NHS anaesthetists Dr. Kariem El-Boghdadly, Dr. Imran Ahmad and Dr. Craig Johnstone shared Danny’s concerns. Together, they discussed potential solutions.
“We agreed it was a good idea to try and audit and monitor our clinical activity as well as find out how many of us would eventually develop COVID-19,” Danny recounts.
For this data to be meaningful, it would need to be collected in as many healthcare facilities as possible. Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals are part of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), so Danny had access to other facilities. But there were challenges. System resources were already being taxed by the pandemic, and no software was available to coordinate data across hospitals.
Taking matters into his own hands, Danny investigated technology that would allow healthcare workers to submit their own data from NHS hospitals across the UK. Emailing spreadsheets was a non-starter, as it would be too time-consuming for Danny to fulfill his hospital duties while having to manually combine submissions. Google Drive provides forms that can dump input into a central spreadsheet, but would make it impossible to validate entries, again resulting in a glut of unusable data. And getting approval for a custom development project would have cost valuable time.
No stranger to cutting-edge technology, Danny chose Knack, a no-code development platform that allows users to rapidly build data-centric applications.
“It seemed to satisfy most of our requirements,” observes Danny, “Affordability, ease of database set up, ability to trial the product before committing funds to it, adequate security to host data from the UK NHS, and the public information for the security standards was comprehensive compared to competitors.”
And just as importantly, it allowed the data entry workflows to be performed wherever healthcare practitioners needed to be.
“We anticipated that healthcare workers would not want to have to find a computer terminal to input data,” he notes, “(Knack) was mobile/smartphone friendly.”
With a platform chosen, he got to work. And with his sense of urgency paired with the rapid-development capabilities of Knack, Danny was able to get results astonishingly fast.
“Within about 3 or 4 days we had a working prototype,” he says. “And after about another week of trialing and tweaking the app and database in our hospital, we could roll out nationwide.”
A few days after IntubateCOVID was launched, the pandemic suddenly became personal. Danny began to feel ill and chose to self-isolate. After running a fever for 8 days, he received test results confirming that he had contracted COVID-19.
Forced to work remotely while his condition worsened, Danny continued to fight back from afar. He pressed on with improving the app as well as promoting adoption through the growing IntubateCOVID twitter account.
Soon, his work began to pay off.
Danny started to receive inquiries from healthcare practitioners outside of the UK, including Dr. Mark Neuman of the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at Penn Medicine. Almost immediately, Neuman became the self-described “US hype man for IntubateCOVID,” helping it catch fire in North America.
Today, the IntubateCOVID app has been adopted by thousands of healthcare workers at hundreds of facilities in over a dozen countries, all with little training or top-down coordination. The app now has the official backing of many respected healthcare organizations, and is collecting and disseminating invaluable data around the world.
Perhaps just as importantly, it has become a symbol of healthcare workers uniting on a grassroots level to stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For our part, Knack is endeavoring to help these efforts by providing free service for any not-for-profit apps assisting in the COVID-19 response.
On April 13th, after a full recovery, Danny returned to work on the front lines of the pandemic. He’s back, fighting alongside the other heroes at NHS’s Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals in London.
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Originally published at https://www.knack.com.
