iPad app eases pain of keeping medical records

Comart Holdings, an IT hardware and software maintenance firm based in Rotherham, hopes to win new business with products to store a patient's medical history and dentistry notes and another which allows people to sign documents.

Comart was set up in 1975 by Kevin Senior who branched out on his own after leaving British Olivetti, only to see it take over his new employer a year later.

Mr Senior is still involved in Comart today but his son, Nathan, is managing director of the business, which has 20 staff and turns over 1m.

Its services include dental practice management software, systems maintenance, software application support and site management.

The new applications were developed because of the practical difficulties for medical and dental surgeries of keeping records for a long period of time.

"If you are running a practice of 2,000 patients, it is a lot to store and it causes problems in (the event of a) fire. They tend to be stored off site, which can be expensive, so you can look at the iPad application," said Mr Senior.

The first, Medical History, is for storing health information on, for example, allergies. Patients can sign the form on the iPad using a stylus or their finger.

Patient Notes, the second, is aimed directly at dentists who wish to annotate a dental plan with planned treatments, while Document Sign is similar to Medical History and allows a signature area and date stamp to be put on the screen.

It also allows the use of any image, so any contract document can be used and the signature area can be moved. All the programmes then save the information for future use.

Mr Senior said that 2009 had been a challenging year but the most recent quarter had been a good one. There has been considerable interest from around the world in the new applications, with half of the downloads coming from America, he added.