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A quiet revolution is taking place in healthcare, and it is as much the result of human ingenuity as the omnipresent mobile technologies driving it.
Virtual consultations have been all but accepted by the public as a way of life, and it took a global pandemic to accelerate their adoption. However, as three Western Sydney University graduates demonstrate, many of the clever inventions for healthcare apps happened well before COVID-19. It just happened to be the perfect time for these apps to enter the mainstream.
The three alumna featured here – Laura Simmons, Marrianne McGhee and Stephanie Mascarenhas – entered the app development space to improve healthcare management with readily-available technology. They’re not technologists, though they don’t need to be. What matters most in an app is how easily people can access the right information.
HELPING OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY PATIENTS STAY ON TRACK AT HOME
Laura Simmons participated in a lot of sport as a kid, from first-grade hockey to cross-country running, ski racing and junior representative basketball. This keen interest in sport later motivated her to study physiotherapy at Western Sydney University.
“I remember enquiring about the physio course at an open day and the lady asking: ‘How good are you at science and maths?,” recalls Simmons.
“So I told her, ‘They’re probably not my strengths, but I love biology and problem-solving’. And she suggested I apply to OT (Occupational Therapy). I’d had my heart set on doing physio, but during the first year of OT at Western I was converted.”
During the practical experience of her Bachelor of Applied Science Occupational Therapy at Western, from which she graduated in 2012, Simmons discovered she was more attuned to working with young people than geriatric patients. She admits it’s probably because she prefers to be creative and not to have to slow down.
Simmons sees parallels in her latest work as an app entrepreneur: she’s working to support therapists use digital solutions in OT. Her technology company Theratrak launched in January 2018, aiming to break down typical therapy barriers of cost, time and location for young people with disabilities by helping clinicians offer digital prescriptions for therapy at-home. Not surprisingly, Theratrak’s user base grew significantly during the pandemic as it was a logical solution for many therapists who couldn’t regularly see their clients in person.
The client version of Theratrak helps people accessing therapy to keep on top of the home program (or activity prescription) with customised notifications, media and tools for tracking progress, while the therapist version includes a suite of digital clinic management tools and customisable client prescriptions for home programs, drawing on a huge library of activities including sensory regulation and motor skills.
“I’ve become really passionate about digital health and the impact technology have on people’s live when it’s implemented in the right way,” says Simmons. “The whole point is to make it easy for everyone.”
STREAMLINING OPERATING THEATRE SAFETY
Marianne McGhee started her nursing career at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital “just to solidify that’s where I wanted to go in life” and then applied for the nursing course closest to home, at Western’s Bankstown campus. She was especially impressed with the evidence-based approach to nursing taught by people who had extensive healthcare experience in hospitals.
“In some ways, I’m glad I had to redo one of the research units because it taught me more about understanding evidence in healthcare and applying it to decisions for patients,” she explains. “We need the evidence to support what we’re doing to optimise our patient outcomes – and it’s also needed to support innovations in the market.”
McGhee launched an innovation of her own called ScrubUp in 2015 after twenty years as a nurse because she saw a lot of inconsistenciesin the on-the-job training nurses were given when preparing to work in the operating room.
“Surgery is becoming more technical, complex and specialised. And while I was fortunate to have great educational support at various times in my career, some nurses aren’t so well supported,” she says. “So I developed ScrubUp to help nurses better prepare for surgery with training and checklists for procedures – it also helps our patients when our surgical teams are better prepared.”
McGhee points to the 40,000-plus downloads of ScrubUp in more than 130 countries around the world as a big motivator to keep on innovating, and proudly recalls an email she received in early 2021 from a nurse in Africa who said ScrubUp helped her set up for a surgical procedure with a surgeon she was unfamiliar with.
“It shows ScrubUp is a universal product that nurses really need in their jobs today,” she adds. “Nursing has changed so much in the two decades of my career – we’ve got surgeons using robots now – and so everyone who works in surgery needs regular training to keep up.”
“Surgery is becoming more technical, complex and specialised. And while I was fortunate to have great educational support at various times in my career, some nurses aren’t so well supported,” she says. “So I developed ScrubUp to help nurses better prepare for surgery with training and checklists for procedures – it also helps our patients when our surgical teams are better prepared."
McGhee points to the 40,000-plus downloads of ScrubUp in more than 130 countries around the world as a big motivator to keep on innovating, and proudly recalls an email she received in early 2021 from a nurse in Africa who said ScrubUp helped her set up for a surgical procedure with a surgeon she was unfamiliar with.
“It shows ScrubUp is a universal product that nurses really need in their jobs today,” she adds. “Nursing has changed so much in the two decades of my career – we’ve got surgeons using robots now – and so everyone who works in surgery needs regular training to keep up.”
GIVING PATIENTS SMARTER WAYS TO MANAGE THEIR HEALTH
Stephanie Mascarenhas was inspired to study medical science at about the age of seven, after her family’s frequent travels took them to India and she was shocked by the lack of health care available for much of the population.
“It really pulled the cord in my heart and from that moment I wanted to dedicate my life to improving people’s health,” she says.
A little more than a decade later she was studying Human Biology Health and Disease at the University of Toronto, Canada when the travel bug bit her again. “I watched a promotional video about life in Australia and I was sold right away, then Western Sydney University was the first university I checked out,” she says. “I looked at the medical science course and the prospects of career work after it and knew this was the one”
Mascarenhas studied for a Bachelor of Medical Science, specialising in Human Bioscience, and was awarded as a high achiever with membership in the Golden Key International Honour Society.
“Medical Science at Western was a great foundation for my career because it opened my eyes to so many different lines of work,” she says. “The anatomy studies with cadavers was incredibly eye-opening, though I remember thinking ‘Wow, this is something very few people in the world experience’, so I was really grateful to be at such a great university.”
As she’d hoped, Western opened career doors on her graduation in 2013, with a clinical placement at Westmead Hospital through the university’s network: “It’s like a direct dripline into the healthcare field from university,” she says.
Since February 2020, Mascarenhas has balanced her work as a Clinical Scientist and Researcher at NSW Health with extra studies in blockchain and entrepreneurship to build Handy Health, an all-in-one health management app that will be available on Google and Apple’s respective app stores.
“My aim is to empower all people to live rich, meaningful lives by taking away the stress that comes from managing complex health needs.,” she says. “I really want people to feel confident to make their health better – my goal is to have the app fulfill that childhood dream of helping all people, especially the poor, access better healthcare.”
WORDS BY STUART RIDLEY
