ORCHA, the Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps, is the world’s largest software platform for delivering safe digital health.
Founded by a NHS clinician, and used by health and care professionals in 70% of NHS regions, ensuring its assessments and formularies are fit for professional use is central to its success.
To ensure patient safety and professional fit and function remain at its forefront, ORCHA has appointed GP and digital health expert Tom Micklewright as Clinical Director to guide its team of clinical advisors and build an international community of clinical experts who are champions in digital health.
As Clinical Director, Dr Micklewright will head up a 13-strong, and growing, clinical team, representing a wide range of medical expertise across the system, including primary, secondary and tertiary care. The team’s role is to clinically assess the safety and effectiveness of digital health tools and to support the adoption of digital health amongst healthcare professionals through research, education, product development and clinical leadership.
Dr Micklewright has been supporting ORCHA as Primary Care Lead for the last eighteen months. He also works as a Cheshire-based GP, a digital health consultant and joins ORCHA from the online GP service Push Doctor, where he was recently Associate Medical Director. He said:
“As a GP working throughout the pandemic, I saw both innovations which scaled at a phenomenal pace and those that surprisingly struggled to get off of the ground. Digital transformation occurs when need, opportunity and simplicity converge and as a busy GP, simplicity is especially important. Finding time to learn about health tech and to become confident using it safely and effectively feels almost impossible, even though we’re all aware of the need and the opportunity: that’s the very gap that ORCHA is looking to close.”
Speaking about ORCHA’s focus on building its clinical team, founding CEO Liz Ashall-Payne, said:
“Clinicians are extremely valuable within digital health companies, for their clinical knowledge, academic background and their understanding of safety, risk, ethics and leadership. More importantly though, clinicians bring lived experience of working in healthcare within their speciality and professional group; this is vitally important to creating usable solutions and achieving digital transformation on the front-line.”
The clinical team spans the UK, with each member also working as a frontline healthcare professional. It will be further expanded over the next year, recruiting clinicians from additional medical disciplines and international health systems. Interested healthcare professionals are encouraged to monitor the careers page on the ORCHA website (https://careers.orchahealth.com).
Dr Micklewright has encouraged frontline clinicians to share their views on digital health at the frontline and the service ORCHA provides, adding that:
“In my view, digital health is our best opportunity for managing the demand and capacity challenges facing modern healthcare. I would therefore encourage healthcare practitioners, especially those who worry about technology and their own digital confidence, to come to digital health with a curious mind, the courage to look ahead and an optimism that by investing time today, we can create a better, more sustainable healthcare model for tomorrow.”
Discover more about ORCHA:
The Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps (ORCHA) is the world’s leading, independent digital health evaluation and distribution organisation. It helps health and care organisations to deliver the right digital health apps, to the right people, at the right time. Its unique insight, assessment, and implementation services are improving the health of the population, the health of our health systems and the health of the health app ecosystem. ORCHA conducts reviews for government organisations across Europe, the Middle East, and Australasia. In the UK, ORCHA conducts reviews for NHS Digital and NHS providers in 70% of regions. NHS England is accelerating adoption across the NHS, placing ORCHA in its National Innovation Accelerator Programme.
