Esther Méndez was awarded a From Idea to Project grant by the eHealth Center to help develop the app

Bellvitge University Hospital has updated its El Meu HUB app, the official mobile app for all users of the hospital, so that it now includes access to El Meu Quiròfan – a section that provides expert content on the main types of surgery provided at the hospital in order to support patients and their families throughout the surgical process. The new version of the hospital's official mobile app is now available on the App Store and Google Play.

El Meu Quiròfan provides a virtual waiting room in which users can follow a patient's surgical process by means of an alphanumeric identifier and without any sensitive data being disclosed. It also provides A&E waiting time information.

The application is based on an innovative idea of Dr Esther Méndez, an assistant at the hospital's Anaesthesiology and Reanimation department and a student on the Master's Degree in E-Health at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). Méndez was awarded a From Idea to Project grant by the UOC's eHealth Center to put her idea into practice. The project has also received a grant from the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) with EU funding under the PECT Innovation Call 2021.

Supporting patients and their families throughout the surgical process via their mobile phones

The El Meu Quiròfan web app will be included as part of the El Meu HUB app as "a tool to educate patients with information on the specific surgery to be undergone, how to prepare for it and the recovery process. This will empower them to become involved in their own healing process with an active role and decision-making power, as well as making the healthcare providers' work easier," explained Dr Beatriz Rosón, Deputy Director of the Interdisciplinary Processes and Surgical Waiting List Centre at the hospital.

In her experience as anaesthesiologist, Dr Méndez noticed that, in spite of being informed about their surgical procedures during pre-surgery visits, most patients had forgotten most of this information by the time they reached the operating theatre. The web app seeks to both increase patient satisfaction and achieve health benefits. "Digital solutions will make our lives easier," she said.

This is yet another step for this Catalan Health Institute (ICS) facility in its quest to provide a comprehensive and increasingly wide-ranging service to residents of L'Hospitalet and El Prat, and to the two million people living in southern Catalonia whom it serves as a reference facility for highly complex cases.

The eHealth Center's From Idea to Project grants

With a view to driving e-health research and innovation projects forward, every year the UOC's eHealth Center organizes a grants programme for students and graduates of the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Faculty of Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications who are either developing an e-health project or have completed a master's degree final project on the subject and want to put it into practice. As well as awarding €3,000 to the winning projects, the eHealth Center also provides them with technical and scientific support during the development of the project.