Sterling Healthcare Ltd
Company overview
Sterling Healthcare is a nationwide organisation providing Occupational Health Services to a varied range of clients. They specialise in helping with work related health issues such as sickness absence management, stress management, health surveillance, travel medicine and substance abuse. They provide cost effective occupational health solutions using a team of highly qualified professionals who are available to work on-site, either full time or part time as required.
The company aims to provide improved efficiency of service for health care professionals across the UK by replacing the traditional Dict-a-phone used by doctors to record clinical notes with next generation mobile devices.
Feasibility Study
Traditionally clinical notes are dictated by the clinician, transcribed by experienced transcribers and then keyed into a patient record system. 
This is a very time consuming process that can potentially introduce transcription errors into the patient record.
By using mobile devices such as iPod/iPhone it was hoped the audio recording made could be directly stored in the patient record system. The study also investigated the ability to send the recorded audio files directly to a transcriber as an interim solution.
Security plays a key role in the transfer of any patient data and so encryption of the data was also important aspect of the feasibility study.
The deliverables of the feasibility study were as follows:
- The ability to be able to digitally sign each record to show authenticity
- The ability to be able to tag each record with both Patient and Doctor identifiers
- The ability to compress the data without significant degradation in quality
- The ability to encrypt the data so that only a member of Sterling Healthcare's staff can decrypt it for playback
The outcome
The Feasibility Study showed that both the iPhone and iPod Touch were viable alternatives for delivering good quality recording of medical notes. Both devices have built-in Wifi which allows the user to send the audio files relatively quickly to a designated server. The iPhone also has the convenience of the 3G network which would allow the files to be sent when not in a wireless hotspot. The iPhone/iPod Touch can be programmed to handle file compression and encryption which is essential for transferring sensitive data across the air waves.
The proof of concept solution developed met all the deliverables of the feasibility study and provided a prototype for piloting with a select group of clients. While not up to production standards, this prototype can communicate with a designated server and send the compressed, encrypted files along with file data which includes the patient and doctor identifiers. Each file is sent with a digital signature to verify the file had not been altered in transit. The prototype records and plays back via the native iPhone audio format but also had the ability to recode this to various audio formats. The recoding of the file aids in creating high quality but relatively small files sizes.
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