Healthcare app development for The Children’s Hospital at Westmead
The team from the James Fairfax Institute of Paediatric Nutrition (JFI) at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead (CHW) partnered with Airteam to modernise their long-standing publication, The Feeding Guide. To eliminate the operational problems of the original paper format, the team needed a solution that would allow healthcare professionals to calculate and update nutritional information without manual spreadsheet dependency and update clinical data via a headless CMS interface.
We delivered a scalable healthcare app that simplifies content updates, supports real-time nutritional formula calculations, and offers the opportunity for future international expansion and subscription-based functionality. Check out how we did it below.
Introducing The Children’s Hospital at Westmead
The Children's Hospital at Westmead (part of Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network) is a paediatric hospital dedicated to helping young people live their healthiest lives. They care for thousands of children every year, providing specialist healthcare services and operating as a teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Sydney.
Away from paper, a shift toward digitisation of healthcare resources
The JFI team at CHW approached us with a need to digitise their long-standing publication, The Feeding Guide, which was available as an A5 booklet and used by healthcare providers such as paediatricians and dieticians.
"We had The Feeding Guide for a very long time as a hard copy book, and we wanted to transform it into a mobile app to keep up with modern times."
The static nature of the paper format created a content distribution bottleneck, preventing real-time updates. The team required a mobile solution to deliver critical feeding information directly at the patient’s bedside.
Another of their core problems was the process of updating nutritional formulas, which change regularly. The Feeding Guide needed to provide in-depth nutritional composition data for a variety of nutritional formulas used across Australia and New Zealand and be updated in real time.
"One of the main issues was that the products change frequently, new ones become available, and some products are discontinued.”
Creating accessible resources through healthcare app development
To translate complex clinical formulas into a usable mobile interface, we employed a clinician-centric rapid prototyping framework.
“We took the JFI team through a series of collaborative activities to deconstruct their problem space, find inspirations and opportunities from the surrounding digital landscape, and weave together an experience that suited the core needs of time-poor clinicians – who needed quick, practical solutions to prescribe to their patients” – Nick Simpson, Head of UX
We developed a mobile solution that digitised their Feeding Guide and provided a back-end CMS (sanity.io), allowing for easy, remote updates to nutritional formula information. The app also needed to support the ability to calculate nutritional values, including energy and macronutrient requirements, for when feeds are customised by health professionals to meet a patient’s unique requirements.
Feeding Guide app designed for healthcare workers
The project resulted in a transformation of The Feeding Guide, making it more accessible for healthcare professionals. With the new app, the team at CHW now updates feeding formulas remotely in real-time, eliminating the lead time required for reprinting physical booklets.
Additionally, the app features calculators that allow for quick and accurate nutritional calculations in real-time, improving convenience and reducing manual work. Other features include a customisable favourites list and the ability to filter through nutritional data, ensuring healthcare providers can find what they need.
App functionality includes:
- Database of paediatric and adult formulas
- Calculators for nutritional and energy requirements
- Reference tables for clinical use
- Guides for managing allergies, gastroenteritis, and preparing formulas
- Breakdowns of nutritional content for easy formula comparison
- Filtering and favourites functionality to allow for quick access to essential information
The app includes complex feeding calculators, such as those for estimating energy requirements and determining the nutritional breakdown for various nutritional formulas, which previously required manual calculation in spreadsheets.
The Feeding Guide’s future includes subscription capabilities and potential international expansion
There is potential for expansion of The Feeding Guide app. With development of subscription capabilities underway, the app will be able to generate revenue to fund future updates and enhancements such as potential international expansion so the guide could support a wider audience.
The use of Sanity and its non-profit plan has meant the JFI team at CHW can maintain and update content with ease and with minimal cost, allowing for continuous updates to nutritional formulas and feeding practices without the need for full app updates.
If your organisation is looking to develop a healthcare app that improves access to critical resources and supports patient care, reach out to us via our contact form or by emailing hello@airteam.com.au. Or learn more about our healthcare app development services on our healthcare software development services page.
