Happy Birthday Black Pear

CEO reflects on 5 year history

It is exactly five years since I founded Black Pear Software to deliver the next generation of healthcare software to clinicians and patients. The intervening years have seen us deliver a number of innovative apps whilst developing the powerful set of frameworks that underpin them. This month we are making those frameworks directly available to healthcare communities as a set of products that will give them the capability to develop their own solutions.

• FirstLight

Our first app, FirstLight, delivered the comprehensive drug knowledge of First Databank to a mobile app for the first time to allow clinicians to make point of care decisions anywhere at any time.

• iRIS

iRIS, our app to manage outreach ophthalmology clinics with bespoke workflows for wet AMD and glaucoma monitoring, demonstrated our ability to access patient data in real time  from disparate systems.

• Anywhere

Vision Anywhere, developed for In Practice Systems, mobilised their Vision GP system reflecting the rich clinical content of Vision in an easy to use native iOS app. Launched on the App Store a couple of months ago it is proving extremely popular with Vision users allowing them instant access to patient data out of the surgery to provide better care and an enhanced range of services.

These apps share underlying frameworks that can be combined to produce similarly innovative solutions in many areas of healthcare. We have been working with a number of healthcare communities for some time to pilot some of these and can now make them available more widely.

pyrus

I am therefore delighted to announce the launch of the pyrus range of products. Pyrus, for those of you not versed in horticultural terminology, is the Latin for pear.

• Cloud

At the heart of the pyrus family sits pyrusCloud, a cloud based EPR that can act as either a permanent repository for patient records or a caching and amalgamation service to connect defined subsets of patient records stored in existing systems to mobile or desktop apps.

• Apps

pyrusApps is a framework for delivering healthcare apps on a number of different platforms. As a native iOS app (such as Vision Anywhere), as a desktop HTML5 app (such as the e-Referral portal) or in the very near future as an Android or Windows 8 native app.

• Kit

pyrusKit is a toolkit for developing pyrusApps, used internally by us for some time it is now available for our customers to use to produce new apps or adapt and configure existing apps. Using the new HTML5 browser based editor a single app can be built and then deployed to apps running on any of the platforms mentioned above.

• pyrusConnect

pyrusConnect is an integration framework allowing disparate systems to exchange healthcare data. It is based around the recently published HL7 FHIR standard. We have production versions of connectors available for all of the main GP systems and some secondary care systems. Community and Social Care system connectors are in development.

• pyrusium

Pyrusium is a desktop web browser, based on the open source WebKit framework that underpins Google’s Chromium browser and Apple’s Safari. The unique feature of Pyrusium is that it acts as a container for web apps to communicate directly with the interfaces of healthcare apps installed on the same desktop. As part of one of our pilot projects, for example, we have pyrusium installed on all of the PC desktops of GP surgeries in one CCG. The app they are running within pyrusium renders the requisite parts of the patient record live from their EMIS web, INPS Vision or Systm One systems for use in an e-referral workflow to local urgent care centres.

The pyrus family of products are linked together as indicated in this diagram:

In the field of bulk data extraction and analysis we have:

• Extract

pyrusExtract is a framework for extracting data from the main GP systems and pseudonymising them for use outside of the practice.

We are attending EHI Live 2014, visit us at stand D90 for more information.