What Is EVAL?

Overview

EVAL Health is a healthcare app platform for practitioners and researchers to build, collaborate, and deploy clinical apps for use within daily workflows. No technical experience or support required.

You might need EVAL if you need to improve clinical collaboration with your healthcare peers and you don't have the budget or time to wait for IT to build your workflow.

For example, you have a clinical protocol, like a step-by-step assessment or decision support workflow, and you want it used online with your team to ensure best practices, consistent data, and meaningful clinical reporting. You can create the protocol in EVAL using the app Builder and share it publicly or privately with your peers right now.

Simply create a free account and start building your first app. It's free to build, share, and play apps on EVAL with your peers. No payment information collected.

For advanced features, like EHR integration with protected health information, then you can optionally pay for those features. If your organization is a non-profit, then financial assistance is available for eligible entities EVAL Health Foundation.

Curious? Jump to Getting Started to create your first EVAL app.

Why Is EVAL Needed?

The mission of EVAL is to reduce the bench-to-bedside timeline by bridging the communication gap between researchers and practitioners.

Medical research knowledge is doubling every 73 days, but the lifecycle for dissemination from bench-to-bedside can take up to 7+ years before practitioners utilize these life-saving strategies.

The time lag of dissemination is largely due to the human-to-human nature in which medical knowledge is transferred today.

"Digitize and use the Internet!" says everyone. Yes, but...

Problem 1: The NIH alone is producing $50BN / year in healthcare research while each healthcare system is spending ~ 3.3% of their budget on IT. Billions of dollars are invested by the US government annually and each healthcare organization is spending only millions of dollars on IT to support their EHR plus a few extras.

Not even the largest health system can hope to consume and translate $50BN of research findings annually, even if it's broken down into small bites. That's still a lot of bytes. 🤓

Problem 2: Healthcare practitioners are presently waiting in a virtual line at their IT department hoping that their clinical day-to-day workflow change request is accepted. Even if Problem 1 was solved and healthcare researchers were publishing digital "apps" from their research findings, these apps would just be adding more pressure to the underfunded, back logged, and bottlenecked healthcare IT departments.

These are not government-sized problems, these are global-sized problem.

EVAL Solution: Create a free common digital platform that researchers and practitioners can use to create practical clinical apps and share them instantly for immediate use. Oh, and make it plug-and-play compatible with HL7 FHIR and the standards of enterprise health departments.

Yes, we did that. ✅

With EVAL, researchers can translate their research findings into practical clinical apps that can be discovered and used immediately within healthcare organizations. Additionally, healthcare practitioners can create their own clinical workflows, decision trees, and informational apps without IT assistance for an immediate impact to the operations of their clinical environment.

Fear not IT department, we are thinking of you every day. EVAL is designed to deploy thousands of niche clinical apps supported by clinicians and communicating with the EHR over a SMART on FHIR integration. The EVAL platform provides the necessary governance and security controls that IT departments require.

There are additional fee-based features that can optionally be purchased, like the highly regulated task of hosting real patient data, but even these costs can be subsidized through the EVAL Health Foundation for non-profit organizations working with underserved populations.

EVAL Key Benefits

Designed For Practitioners & Researchers

There are not enough software developers to solve the problem of translating the world's rapidly expanding medical archives into practical apps useful at the point of care. The only way to keep up with $80 Billion in annual global medical research findings is to spread the workload across everyone in healthcare, starting with healthcare practitioners and researchers.

As intimidating as app creation can sound, EVAL is for anyone with the curiosity to make a difference. No special training required. In fact, many practitioners already received some training in school for how to create decision trees, workflows, and assemble best practices. For those who haven't, try out the basic example in Getting Started to see how fun and easy it is to create your first app!

No Code Required

No technical skill is needed to build an EVAL app. The intuitive EVAL app builder makes app creation approachable for anyone ready to implement clinical research or best practices. Click "New EVAL" from your personal EVAL library and use this online guide and the community message board to advance your skill. Contact EVAL Support for extra help (we got you!).

For advanced calculations, EVAL utilizes the spreadsheet formula language, which is familiar to many in the research field and easy enough to learn with thousands of online tutorials.

Collaborate Globally

Co-create with your peers across organizations before releasing an app for review. Choose when to share an app with a broader audience, progressively roll-out usage across organizations, or opt-in to share publicly with the world for the common good. Healthcare practitioners now have a platform to formalize their expertise in workflows, calculators, decision trees, and informational apps that can have an instant global impact within the healthcare community.

Open-Source Apps

All apps created on the EVAL platform are open source by nature. Whoever has permission to use the app also has permissions to open the builder in read-only mode to inspect how the app is configured. Transparency is essential to building trust that the app is accurate and safe to use through an open continuous peer review of the app source.

Data Protection By Design and By Default

EVAL Health is proud to have integrated GDPR data protection by design and by default principles into our continuous software development process as a core value of our technology platform. EVAL Health operates within the strictest data protection guidelines and is committed to being in compliance with your GDPR, CMS/HIPAA, or equivalent healthcare jurisdiction.

Bring Your Own EHR (or No EHR!)

We're passionate about EHR integration and are continuously evolving with the HL7 FHIR standard to make EVAL Health feel like an extension of your EHR. EVAL ensures that your EHR is the primary "source of truth" and the starting point for practitioners to access EVAL. As with any good EHR integration, patient results are written back to the EHR as clinical notes for a unified patient record.

Some organizations might start without an EHR or might not even have an EHR. That's okay! EVAL provides a secure and privacy compliant patient workspace ("Charts") where practitioners are able to conduct evaluations and store the results within a basic patient chart. When ready, an EHR can be attached to your EVAL account for expanded capabilities.