An app developed specifically for oncologists by an Irish software company has just received CE certification – the third app in the world to do so.
ONCOassist is a new smartphone application developed specifically for oncologists that offers clinical decision support tools.
Traditionally, oncologists have lost time searching for academic papers and complex formulas online. ONCOassist changes all of this by offering oncologists the required clinical decision support tools to be used at the point of care.
Dr Richard Bambury, Eoin O’Carroll and Kevin Bambury are the founders of ONCOassist. All graduates of University College Cork, the team was recently selected out of hundreds of other applicants to participate in the prestigious Healthbox Europe start-up accelerator, located in the Hub Westminster, central London.
Bambury, a medical oncologist working at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, identified a need for a point-of-care application designed specifically for oncologists and teamed up with his brother Kevin and Eoin O’Carroll to develop the application.
“I saw a pressing need for a high-technology mobile application that offered me all the tools I needed as I did my rounds,” stated Bambury.
“For example,” he said, “in order to assess how much benefit patients are likely to receive from chemotherapy, we have traditionally used estimates based on prior clinical trial data that may or may not be applicable to each patient. There are a limited number of online tools available to make more precise estimates, but none of these are in smartphone format.”
Getting a CE mark
ONCOassist is only the third European company to take the step of getting a CE mark, which is the European Union quality control regulation analogous to the FDA in the US.
“As our application falls within the definition of a medical device, we felt having a CE mark was of the utmost importance” said Kevin Bambury.
Currently released for the iPhone and iPad, the team plans to role out the platform for use on Android devices within the next six to 12 months.
