Everyone, including patients, doctors, nurses and other health professionals and app developers, is invited to submit new ideas of health apps and online maps they think would be useful.

For the next six weeks, people can visit maps and apps and suggest favourite apps, ideas for apps or health maps they would like to see, as well as vote for their favourite ideas submitted by others.

In the video below Dr Shaibal Roy explains more about apps and how you can get involved.

The call for ideas, suggestions and votes for apps or health maps come under one of these five themes:

• Personalisation and choice of care and support: for example, an app that allows a user to search for health information online
• Better health and care outcomes: for example, an app that allows a patient to manage their health condition
• Autonomy and accountability: for example, an app that allows patients to publicly rate and review their local health services
• Improving public health: for example, an app that tracks an individual’s levels of exercise
• Improving long-term care and support: for example, an app that helps with planning long-term care and support

Examples of existing apps that benefits patients include:

• Choosing Well app from NHS Yorkshire and Humber, gives addresses of the nearest NHS services
• Paediatric Emergency Drugs app developed by Evelina Children’s Hospital helps calculate correct medicine dosage;
• iBreastCheck, Breakthrough Breast Cancer – gives information about checking breasts for abnormalities;
• MicroGuide, NHS Southampton – gives practical support to clinicians when treating patients with infections;

Google says,

“You can build just about any app you can imagine with App Inventor … To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.”

Well the Surepoint team have signed up to roadtest App Inventor and we’ll be reporting back on what we found very soon.

This 60-second video gives you a flavour of how quick and easy it is to build an app for your phone.