Press Release

IQVIA collaborates with EMIS Health to launch an enhanced version of the EMIS App Library, giving more than half of GP surgeries in England immediate access to clinically tested apps for millions of patients.

The collaboration brings together EMIS Health’s EMIS Web, the market leading clinical system for general practitioners (GPs) and IQVIA’s AppScript®, an advanced digital health prescribing, monitoring and studies platform. It enables GPs, clinical pharmacists and other clinical staff to find and recommend high quality, critically validated digital health apps to patients through EMIS Web.

EMIS App Library ensures only the highest quality-assured apps are made available by restricting the service to those apps currently listed on the NHS Apps Library, or those which pass strict evaluation criteria based on NHS Digital’s Digital Assessment Questions (DAQs). When clinicians recommend a digital health app, the patient immediately receives a text to their mobile phone or email directing them to download it.

Brian Clancy, Co-Lead & Associate Director, AppScript® by IQVIA™ commented on the significance of the collaboration to the global digital therapeutics industry, namely the hundreds of businesses around the world who are attempting to develop and commercialise clinically validated apps for the prevention, treatment, or management of medical conditions:

“We have partnered with EMIS Health to immediately make EMIS App Library by AppScript® available to all GPs using EMIS Web in England, representing 58% of GP Practices. Together with complementary developments coming from the NHS, such as NHS Digital’s Digital Assessment Questionnaire (an app quality assessment standard), the NHS Apps Library (a listing of high quality digital health apps) and accelerated NHS commissioning activity of digital therapeutics (providing NHS patients with access to digital therapeutics), the availability of a national distribution infrastructure for digital therapeutics makes the UK the best market in the world to develop, launch, and scale these important medical innovations."

Currently, nine apps are available through the EMIS App Library service on a national basis, including; Be Mindful, a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) which has shown to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression; Pzizz for people seeking to improve their sleep and ReacT2D for prediabetics seeking to lower their weight and potentially their diabetes risk, as well as regional deployments of commissioned digital therapeutics including Sleepio for people with sleep problems and Liva Healthcare for people with newly diagnosed Type 2 Diabetes. IQVIA’s innovative technology and domain expertise will bring additional world-class digital health apps to the EMIS App Library. 

Digital Health apps have been shown to improve patients’ clinical outcomes in randomised controlled trials across 27 different therapy areas including: diabetes, anxiety, depression, cancer and respiratory conditions (see note 4). Additional research found that if proven digital health apps were widely adopted, £2bn of savings per year in avoidable A&E visits, emergency hospitalisation, and other forms of utilisation could result. This would equate to more than £200k a year in savings that could be redirected to frontline care per GP surgery.

Today’s announcement follows the launch last year of AppScript™ One Click Studies on EMIS Web to make it easier for GPs to recruit more patients in clinical research. The platform automates many research tasks for both clinicians and patients including: alerts on patient arrival; electronic sharing of study information via text or email; and provision of informed consent on trial participation.

This innovation will also empower GPs to seamlessly, and instantaneously, invite patients to participate in relevant and appropriate clinical trials, including new patient-centric studies that often leverage study-specific apps. Such enhanced enrollment capability for eligible patients in relevant clinical trials is included in the recently announced NHS Long Term Plan, which has a plan to recruit one million UK patients into clinical trials each year by 2024/25.

Tim Sheppard, Senior Vice President (SVP) and General Manager, Northern Europe IQVIA, said: “We believe that this collaboration between IQVIA and EMIS Health represents not only a critical inflection point in the maturation of digital health, but also a signal of how traditional silos between routine care and research are being broken down by embracing integrated health software platforms and associated workflows.

“Only by fully appreciating and leveraging clinicians’ real world activity can we accomplish our vision of Human Data Science, where every clinical decision can be made based on credible evidence. If rolled out widely, this technology has the potential to drive significant cost savings for the NHS through improved prevention and management of chronic conditions and support the delivery of clinical research goals as set out in the NHS Long Term Plan. We are proud that this initiative and its broad-based implementation, makes the NHS the world’s most advanced primary healthcare system with respect to the delivery of digitally enabled care.”

Dr Shaun O’Hanlon, Chief Medical Officer of EMIS Group, said: “The EMIS App Library will offer busy GPs the opportunity to recommend trusted healthcare apps to patients. It’s part of our wider partner ecosystem, connecting software and services from more than 100 specialist partner organisations to deliver efficiencies in healthcare and better patient outcomes.”

Richard Latham, Managing Director of Wellmind Media Ltd., the developer of Be Mindful, commented “We’re delighted that the Be Mindful online course is included in EMIS App Library by AppScript®. We’ve observed over the years that people who are actively recommended Be Mindful by a clinician as an intervention for stress, anxiety or depression have far better engagement with the course than those who join it through other channels. These course participants are more motivated to carry out the mindfulness practices and home work that are necessary to enjoy the full benefits of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). So for us, this is a highly significant opportunity to generate mental health recovery outcomes at a much larger scale.”

About IQVIA
IQVIA (NYSE:IQV) is a leading global provider of advanced analytics, technology solutions and contract research services to the life sciences industry. Formed through the merger of IMS Health and Quintiles, IQVIA applies human data science — leveraging the analytic rigor and clarity of data science to the ever-expanding scope of human science — to enable companies to reimagine and develop new approaches to clinical development and commercialization, speed innovation and accelerate improvements in healthcare outcomes. Powered by the IQVIA CORE™, IQVIA delivers unique and actionable insights at the intersection of large-scale analytics, transformative technology and extensive domain expertise, as well as execution capabilities. With more than 58,000 employees, IQVIA conducts operations in more than 100 countries.

IQVIA is a global leader in protecting individual patient privacy. The company uses a wide variety of privacy-enhancing technologies and safeguards to protect individual privacy while generating and analyzing information on a scale that helps healthcare stakeholders identify disease patterns and correlate with the precise treatment path and therapy needed for better outcomes. IQVIA’s insights and execution capabilities help biotech, medical device and pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers, government agencies, payers and other healthcare stakeholders tap into a deeper understanding of diseases, human behaviors and scientific advances, in an effort to advance their path toward cures. To learn more, visit www.iqvia.com.

About EMIS Group
EMIS Group is the UK leader in connected healthcare software and services. Its solutions are widely used across every major UK healthcare setting from primary, community & acute care, to high street pharmacies and specialist care services. EMIS Group helps healthcare professionals in over 10,000 organisations share vital information, facilitating better, more efficient healthcare and supporting longer and healthier lives.

EMIS Group serves the following healthcare markets under the EMIS Health brand:

• Primary, Community & Acute Care, as the UK leader in clinical management systems for healthcare providers and commissioners. EMIS Health products, including the flagship EMIS Web, hold over 40 million patient records and are used by more than 100,000 professionals in nearly 6,000 healthcare organisations.
• Community Pharmacy, with the UK’s single most used integrated community pharmacy and retail system.
• Specialist Care, as England’s leading provider of diabetic eye screening software and other ophthalmology-related solutions. 

These markets are also supported by other EMIS Group businesses:

• under the Patient brand, the UK’s leading independent provider of patient-centric medical and well-being information and related transactional services.
• under the Egton brand, providing specialist ICT infrastructure, hardware and engineering services, and non-clinical software into health and social care.
• under the Dovetail Lab brand, a health technology company developing blockchain software to facilitate the integration of healthcare data.