Consulting Case Study: Public Health Wales — NEWS App
1000 Lives Improvement is the national improvement service for NHS Wales. We worked with them to improve their digital provision for clinicians diagnosing Sepsis.
Sepsis is thought to be the cause of around 2200 deaths per year in Wales, with many preventable by early intervention. As part of their work 1000 Lives Improvement have introduced the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) a simple scoring tool, to aid clinician decision making when assessing patient risk of sepsis.
The NEWS toolkit includes a simple card based reference tool, that had been directly converted into an iOS application. However, over time, the application was not upgraded and had experienced issues with newer versions of iOS. The 1000 Lives Improvement team approached Nudjed to rapidly redevelop the application to include an iOS and Android App, with a simple to maintain, shared codebase and any other improvements to the experience that a redesign could bring.
Nudjed worked with 1000 Lives team to further develop and define the app specification, working in parallel with prototyping and development teams in agile sprints, to ensure the tight timescales could be met. React Native was chosen as the development framework, due to it’s simple code portability and high levels of documentation.
React Native draws on native iOS and Android componentry and Nudjed quickly identified several frameworks that would support a shared “look & feel” across both platforms. Selecting the componentry early in the process allowed the design team to rapidly develop User Interface prototypes in sketch, sharing them for comment via Invision, to facilitate quick decision making across teams.
After two weeks of work, the design was frozen and development work began to create and customise components. The app was deployed over 3 sprints from commissioning covering design, build and testing. The build combines React Native, Ant Design UI and Redux frameworks, with both iOS and Android applications compiled from a single codebase.
Though simple, the application allows the 1000 Lives team scope to redevelop, expand or integrate the system into further work, including the potential to develop cloud based web interfaces, API driven analytics or new applications.

