ELFy Asthma app in Tower Hamlets product test

App brand ELFy has announced that the St Paul’s Way community in London’s Tower Hamlets is hosting product testing for its inaugural Asthma version on the IOS (Apple) platform in August 2015. Volunteers with asthma are testing the app, with their questionnaire responses enabling final improvements and any technical bug fixes before a full launch campaign.

The St Paul’s Way community comprises the St Paul’s Way Trust School, whose patrons include Professor Brian Cox and ELFy partner Professor John Wass; the Lincoln and Bonamy Pharmacies led by Mr Atul Patel; and St Paul’s Way Medical Centre (ranked ‘outstanding’ by the Care Quality Commission), led by Dr Joe Hall.

‘Building an app brand designed to help the millions of people in the UK with long term conditions is essentially a large-scale community project’, commented ELFy partner Sarah Spain. ‘So it makes perfect sense to have a real Inner London community contributing at its outset. We’re enormously grateful to them, and to the Andrew Mawson Partnership, for helping us in our ambition to make ELFy the very best it can be - and make a real difference to ordinary people’s everyday health.’

Designed and developed by George Shapter and Joe Robertson at QIP Creative, ELFy Asthma will be joined by other versions aimed at long-term conditions in both IOS and Android forms throughout 2015/16.

About ELFy

Avoidable complications and deaths among Britain’s growing population of people with long-term conditions is overwhelmingly the result of people forgetting to take their medication correctly.

ELFy confronts this issue head-on with a family of apps combining an easy to use alerts system alongside your medical profile; a problem-prevention and emergency response section; easily accessible information on your condition; and key pop-up alerts.

Designed to appeal to all sectors of the population, ELFy is a friendly tool that combines the essentials for managing long-term conditions successfully, lowering both adverse clinical outcomes, costs to health services budgets and resources, and millions of days lost to industry.

ELFy was created by Professor John Wass, Sarah Spain and Simon Carbery

Contact: sarahjkspain@gmail.com, john.wass@nhs.net, scarbery@mac.com                                                                       

 Long term conditions. Key facts: 

·      1 in 4 UK citizens (15+ million) has a long term condition

source: The King’s Fund

·      Diabetes costs the NHS £14bn a year - 10% of total NHS budget. 80% of that expenditure is spent treating preventable complications source: House of Committee Select Committee

·      Nearly a third of all working time lost to employee absence is attributable to long term conditions source: CBI

·      Cost of absenteeism from diabetes is £8.4 bn per year source: diabetes.co.uk

·      Around 5.4 million people have asthma source Asthma UK

·      Emergency asthma admissions cost the NHS £61 million a year. 75% of admissions are preventable source: Right Care Atlas Of Variation

·      A child is admitted to hospital with an asthma attack every 18 minutes source Asthma UK