• Omnis mobile solution •
Patient Diary mobile app is available for all platforms in record time
thanks to Omnis JavaScript Client
Freiburg
Germany
www.computer-nach-mass.de
The Challenge: Patient diaries have proved their worth in medicine for a long time both in monitoring and in therapy, mainly for diseases with unstable pathology, such as diabetes, asthma and coronary heart diseases, but especially for bipolar disorder and depression. However, until now the patient diaries have been created on paper and then transcribed to computer, a process which is very time consuming and creates the possibility for errors – this does not benefit the patient, their doctor or hospital staff. Due to modern software and communication technologies, patients are now able to enter their experiences into electronic patient diaries, which means that monitoring and diagnosis can be done much quicker and more accurately.
The Solution
The University Hospital Freiburg in Germany is one of the largest medical facilities in Europe and was recently ranked by the German magazine “Focus” as the top provider of treatment therapy for manic-depressive and bipolar patients. Throughout the treatment of depression and bipolar disorder, the hospital makes extensive use of electronic patient diaries and so-called “Life Charts” which have multiple benefits for patients, including early warning of health impairment, better planning for treatments, and improved data for monitoring and research purposes. The electronic system that manages the diaries and Life Charts for patients at University Hospital Freiburg was created in Omnis Studio by the Freiburg based developer CNM (“Computer nach Maß” or “Computer made-to-Measure”) in cooperation with the German Society for Bipolar Disorder (DGBS), with an increasing number of patients in many different countries using the system.
In its original form the electronic patient diary system was the first research project sponsored by the German Society for Bipolar Disorder (DGBS). Today it has become the most comprehensive database about bipolar disorder worldwide with over eight million records, allowing the system to respond to medical questions by data mining and simulation studies. Therefore studies with patients can be made safer and more meaningful or even fully eliminated. The electronic patient diary developed by CNM is a non-commercial project that is also sponsored by IBM. Omnis Software support this project with free of charge licenses.
The Company
Computer nach Maß Systemhaus GmbH has been creating software solutions for 25 years. As well as creating individual solutions like the electronic patient diary, CNM also handles the evaluation and analysis of survey data, amongst others, for the State government of Baden-Würtemberg in Germany. A special focus is in the area of data capture and data mining, including the annual survey of 35,000 selected people throughout Europe, which is managed using Omnis.
Why Omnis
The electronic patient diary system started ten years ago with an Omnis application for Palm handheld computers. In the following years many different “thin” clients were developed, including one for the Omnis Web Client (a web browser plugin), for WAP, an ultra thin client, a PDF client, an SMS version, then Windows Mobile and more recently an iOS version. Using Omnis Studio, CNM was able to develop the platform independent code for these different clients while keeping up with technical developments and the changing needs of patients. Nevertheless it always required a large amount of work to build and continuously maintain all these different clients. However, thanks to the new JavaScript Client technology in Omnis Studio, CNM was able to build a platform independent JavaScript Client for the patient diary system that runs on all web browsers and all mobile devices.
“Without Omnis we would not have been able to control the complexity of the system,” said Dr. Lars Schärer, Managing Director and head developer of CNM. “With the Omnis JavaScript Client a dream came true for us. We only have to develop one client from now on. The porting of the patient diary system to the new JavaScript Client succeeded in record time: our engineers said that they would have taken eight times longer with other tools. It really worked with the same code as the native iOS Client without any problems.”
Dr. Lars Schärer,
Managing Director and head developer of CNM