The NHS, the publicly funded healthcare system in the UK, launched its new Covid-19 app in England and Wales. Zühlke UK, the British subsidiary of the company based in Schlieren in the canton of Zurich, was involved in the development process, which lasted a total of 12 weeks until public roll out. Overall, 70 specialists from Zühlke participated in this project, which forms part of the test and trace system as well as the package of protective measures implemented by the NHS, according to a press release.
“Designing and developing a feature rich, medical grade contact tracing app, that can scale to millions of users, be accurate, and ensure data privacy, in twelve weeks was a tremendous challenge”, comments Neil Moorcroft, who headed up the Zühlke project team, in the press release. In addition, Wolfgang Emmerich, CEO of Zühlke UK, explains: “The ability to develop rapidly comes from an architecture that allows parallel development of multiple feature sets. This same architecture must also be able to scale rapidly to millions of users which is experience that Zühlke has gained from developing retail banking applications. The NHS Covid-19 app is also a medical device and has now achieved a CE mark”.
Fabrizio Ferrandina, CEO of the Zühlke Group, discussed the outlook with regard to future developments, explaining how the unification of technology, engineering and medical compliance is a global trend. In addition, he stated that the ‘app as a medical device’ represents a remarkable evolution of the smartphone that will contribute to the transformation of digital health in all its manifestations.
