The Challenge

• Improvements in care have led to a shift in the burden of disease from infectious to chronic. This is most apparent in children with chronic disease, who are now more likely to survive into adulthood.
• For many conditions, we know that how long children survive and their quality of life are determined to a very large extent by how well they stick to treatment plans.
• These treatment plans are often complicated, boring and difficult to remember, leading to a lack of adherence.
• This is compounded in children of school-age as they start gaining independence, parents have less influence and children are more aware of what their peers are or are not doing. For many children, having a chronic condition is isolating and makes them feel different from those around them, and this is particularly apparent when they have to engage with treatment.

 The Idea

• Digital platform to facilitate comprehensive care for children with chronic conditions
• To provide fun ways to interact with and monitor their own disease with easy access to peer support and education
• Integration with smart devices to allow gamification of therapy, accurate measures of progress and support interaction with clinicians
• Provide accurate data and analytics on condition management and progression to support integrated care, understanding of effectiveness of therapy and impact of relevant personal and contextual factors 
• Widen access to high quality information sharing, education and treatment monitoring; reduction of inequalities in care delivery
• Provide support to optimise the wider determinants of health, which we increasingly recognise as crucial to quality of life with chronic conditions
• Facilitate the move of healthcare to the community in line with the current health system-wide effort towards empowering self-management and person-centred care

Impact and Learning

• Peer support between children with chronic conditions; social and emotional support
• Better individual understanding of disease, allowing patients to manage and advocate for their own condition
• Fun user experience to make managing conditions less onerous and boring
• Improved medication adherence
• Improved engagement with physicians and allied therapists
• Collaboration between healthcare providers and patients