Mersey Burns wins NHS adoption by selling its IP for £1 and passing peer review

In 2010, while planning to leave the Royal Army Medical Corps for software, Chris Seaton was asked to build an app with plastic surgeons Rowan Pritchard Jones and Paul McArthur, who had been considering writing a book instead. The result, written around 2011, was Mersey Burns: a doctor colours in the burned areas on an outline of a body, enters age, weight and time since injury, and the app returns the resuscitation-fluid prescription, removing the mis-estimation and arithmetic errors that hurt seriously burned patients.

The hard problem was not the code but adoption. To get local NHS authorities to take the app, the team sold them the intellectual property rights for £1, so the trust owned the app and carried the liability for its use — turning the institution from a cautious buyer into the party responsible for championing it. A health-and-innovation cluster added a grant of several tens of thousands of pounds.

They then proved the app like a new medical procedure. A peer-reviewed study in the Emergency Medicine Journal showed lower variance in burn-area estimation and fluid calculation than the traditional method, and the app was formally regulated as a medical device — the first phone app in the UK to go through that process. Being first let the team propose their own runtime self-test system and the published study as the evidence base; the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons added its badge.

The University of Manchester's media operation turned the story — former soldier, student, app for badly burned patients — into TV, radio and a national-newspaper feature, and the team entered every health-and-technology award in reach, winning overall at the 2013 eHealth Insider Awards among others. NICE, the UK's clinical-evidence authority, published a 25-page briefing on the app.