As the World’s leading health app advisor organisation, we help health and social care organisations to choose and prescribe health apps that will safely and securely make the biggest impact. Our objective reviews evaluate more than 180 aspects of an app, spanning clinical effectiveness, data privacy and user experience, enabling us to give each app an overall score.

Now, to help health professionals and users spot apps that exceed our 65% quality threshold, we’ve created a badge. It represents a huge achievement, and will help people to quickly and easily recognise the apps that have a good performance level across our criteria. Look out for these badges and then read our review to get the full picture. You can read more about the ORCHA Review process here.

Suicide is the biggest killer of under 35s in the UK, making charities like Papyrus vitally important. Papyrus is a national charity dedicated to the prevention of young suicide. ORCHA has provided Papyrus with their own digital microsite, an online platform that helps young people to manage their mental health.

Papyrus want young people to be able to access information to support them with their suicidal thoughts, and use apps that are safe and secure. Without access to ORCHA’s App Library via Papyrus’ microsite, young people are at risk of downloading apps that could have a negative impact on their health or encourage suicidal behaviour. ORCHA reviews apps according to their clinical effectiveness, data privacy and user experience, ensuring that users will be able to distinguish between safe and unsafe apps, unlike on unregulated app stores.

Watch our video above, where Papyrus discusses how ORCHA’s provision of a digital health tool allows their advisors to recommend apps to the young people directly, thereby providing vulnerable young people with access to safe resources to help manage their health.

Want to find the best pregnancy apps but don’t know where to start?

With so much to keep track of, learn and prepare when expecting a baby, it can be hard to find the time for all your usual day-to-day commitments, never mind research the most effective apps to help you and your baby. That’s where ORCHA steps in as your trusted health app guide.

How do I know which pregnancy app is the best when there are thousands to choose from?

ORCHA has reviewed hundreds of pregnancy apps so that you can find the safest and most effective. Each app’s ORCHA Score provides a clear way of seeing which pregnancy apps are the best. Whether you’re looking for a pregnancy test app, pregnancy tracker app, the best fertility app, or week by week pregnancy app, ORCHA finds the best ones so you don’t have to, whilst still giving you a wide variety of apps to choose from.

What are the best pregnancy apps on ORCHA’s App Finder?

There are many high scoring pregnancy apps on our App Library which can be useful before, during and after your pregnancy. Whilst these apps can never replace professional medical advice, they can be a useful addition as a quick and easy way of tracking fertility and pregnancy. Here, we explore six of the best pregnancy apps reviewed by ORCHA:

• Mum & Baby – Developed in partnership between families and maternity staff from NHS trusts in North West London, Mum & Baby can provide support from the start of pregnancy to early parenthood. The app allows you to understand your choices for maternity care in North West London, access information for all stages of your maternity journey, and make personalised plans for your care during pregnancy, birth and beyond. Mum & Baby achieved an ORCHA Score of 86% on Android, making it the highest scoring pregnancy app on our App Library.
• Baby Buddy – Designed with parents and health professionals, Baby Buddy provides personal baby support in the form of a pregnancy and parenting app. It is a virtual friend that provides video resources, personalised ‘Daily Information’, and allows you to track the progress of your pregnancy and child. Baby Buddy achieved an ORCHA Score of 84% on iOS and 83% on Android.
• Natural Cycles – Birth Control – This app can be used as a fertility tracker, or, in the USA and Europe only, as a method of birth control. Natural Cycles uses a smart algorithm to learn your cycle and identify your ovulation by analysing your basal body temperature. Backed by scientific research, the app is the first digital method of birth control available in both the USA and Europe. Natural Cycles achieved an ORCHA Score of 84% on both iOS and Android.
• Ovia Pregnancy Tracker – Ovia Pregnancy Tracker allows you to track your baby’s development and your own wellbeing as your pregnancy progresses. It includes a customisable health tracker, a calendar for organisation, a community of mums and expectant mums, and over 2000 pregnancy articles and tips to help you. The app achieved an ORCHA Score of 79% on iOS.
• Glow Nurture – Pregnancy App – Glow Nurture is a pregnancy tracker app in which you can log your symptoms on a daily basis, as well as receiving reminders for appointments and medication. It also includes a trimester-specific pregnancy tracker which changes as your pregnancy moves to the next stage. Further, the app provides postpartum and miscarriage support. Glow Nurture achieved an ORCHA Score of 73% on iOS.
• Breast Start – This app provides evidence-based information from NHS professionals about all aspects of breastfeeding. It also allows you to find support locally and nationally, including giving advice on local breastfeeding-friendly places. Breast Start achieved an ORCHA Score of 71% on Android.

Due to our continual re-review process, all app scores are subject to change. As such, we’d always encourage you to view our app reviews on our App Library, as this reflects Live data and app updates which are continuously changing. Our re-review process ensures that the most up-to-date information for the latest version of an app can be accessed via our App Library.

During our recent attendance at HIMSS Europe 19 in Helsinki, ORCHA CEO, Liz Ashall-Payne, chaired and spoke in a number of sessions, as well as discussing ORCHA’s health app review process with HIMSS Consultant, John Crawford. Our contribution to HIMSS’ showcase of dynamic health-tech solutions, as featured in Healthcare IT News, highlighted the need to provide health app awareness, access and trust.

The interview for HIMSS TV began with Liz explaining that the initial idea for ORCHA came from thinking about ‘how we could improve efficiency and the quality of services to benefit more patients’ in the healthcare industry, which led her into digital health.

Liz went on to describe the opportunity that digital health brings, in that the provision of digital health solutions, such as apps, can help multiple patients at once. The challenge, however, is that there are over 300,000 unregulated health apps in app stores.

ORCHA addresses this challenge by creating a health app solution which increases awareness, access, trust and governance, in terms of encouraging digital health adoption. Liz emphasised the significance of ORCHA’s service by explaining that the journey to trusted digital health is ‘not just about [providing] clinical evidence, but also about [whether the app] data [is] secure’, which ORCHA takes into account by incorporating data privacy, clinical assurance and user experience into our review process.

Given that ‘trust is the biggest barrier’ to increasing the uptake of health apps, ORCHA’s ‘mission […] to distribute great health apps to people’ becomes primarily about providing users and healthcare professionals with a means of trusting digital health and, thus, seeing it as a viable healthcare option.

As Liz discusses in her interview, ORCHA’s robust app review process is the key to increasing trust in digital health. This review process begins with a data scrape of the health and fitness apps on Apple’s App Store, and Google Play. These apps are then filtered according to when they were last updated, before being curated into ORCHA’s 260 condition areas, and subsequently put into rank order from the most to least downloaded.

ORCHA’s filtration of the apps from app stores gives a queue that determines the order in which the apps will be reviewed by our Review Team. After the app queue has been generated, ORCHA then uses a classification system to assess the safety and quality of health apps, as well as finding out the apps’ functions and features.

But what makes ORCHA unique? Liz explains that ORCHA has ‘created a review accrediting engine that helps us process apps very quickly’, so we are unique in our very streamlined accreditation system and the consequent speed with which our reviews can be carried out. Not only do we review apps according to their ‘data security, data safety, clinical validity and clinical safety, and user design,’ we also understand the ‘continuous cycle’ of reviewing and rereviewing apps. Our system ensures that we are aware if an app has changed since it was last reviewed, meaning that the apps on our App Library are kept up-to-date with accurate information.

Furthermore, healthcare professionals can use ORCHA to find and prescribe the best apps to patients through the 87 local health app libraries that we provide. This app recommendation process is used so that professionals can ‘find a safe product and then use the system to prescribe via text message.’

Liz’s interview concludes with the notion that digital health can have the best success by being used alongside traditional healthcare services and products. Digital health is not intended to replace traditional methods, but to enhance them. For instance, sometimes a drug may be most effective, sometimes an app on its own, and sometimes a combination of the two. ORCHA believes that the way forward is for pharma and digital health companies to work together, rather than being in competition.

Watch Liz Ashall-Payne’s interview at HIMMS here: https://players.brightcove.net/1824526989001/default_default/index.html?videoId=6045583737001