ORCHA
Halton
ORCHA is the world’s leading health app evaluation and advisor organisation. It helps governments, health and social care organisations to choose and deliver health apps that safely make the biggest impact in terms of improving outcomes.
Six Stories, Six Boroughs tells the story of a business from each borough of the Liverpool City Region that has used support from the Local Growth Hub as a springboard to success. In this article we take a look at the business from Halton, ORCHA.
ORCHA was founded in early 2015 as an organisation for the review of care and health applications. It independently reviews and ranks existing health and care apps using a seven stage clinically and academically assessed framework, enabling the end user to easily identify apps reaching the highest standards.
With only 15% of reviewed apps meeting minimum standards, one of ORCHA’s main aims is to reduce the number of people downloading apps that provide misleading or inaccurate information and recommendations, using its framework to identify the best apps.
It aims to increase the recognition of health care apps as part of the day to day management of health and care related conditions through creating locally targeted and locally branded application libraries for users to access, which should help to support the need for finding apps that are both accredited and best placed to assist with a user’s needs.
In addition, ORCHA offers its service to healthcare professionals to provide them with the ability to prescribe the best apps to their patients. According to the company, its service sees 60-70% of patients downloading an app off the back of a recommendation.
ORCHA is one of LCR’s fastest-growing tech businesses, providing services for health organisations in five countries. Their recent growth, facilitated by the Local Growth Hub, has meant that they have grown from 7 employees to over 30 and have newly opened offices in both London and Utrecht, Holland.
CEO of ORCHA Liz Ashall-Payne, said:
“As result of the work we’ve done with our growth partners, we’re supporting an increasing number of organisations and are now operating internationally.”
ORCHA is a prime example of what the growing and innovative businesses in the LCR region can achieve with the right support. Having recently been featured on Activate’s LCR Tech Climbers 2019 List, the business appears to have a bright future.