Personal medical researcher in your pocket

The Mental Elf app heralds the second mental health revolution as it brings medical research into the smartphone world for the first time.

The newly launched app means medical practitioners need only three minutes a day to access and read the very latest and pertinent mental health information - and save themselves hundreds of pounds in the process.

This revolutionary knowledge app costs just £2.99 and delivers only high quality up-to-date research. It filters out irrelevant or biased unreliable evidence, and sends an easy-to-read medical research summary directly to your smartphone each day.

Keeping abreast of the latest medical research is proving an impossible task for busy mental health professionals. Currently, they would have to read around 20 medical journal articles a day to keep up-to-date with the latest information and allocate approximately 6 hours each day of their time to do so.

Those days are now over thanks to the Mental Elf app.

The easy to use app will give one piece of ‘golden’ information a day (every working day) making it easier than ever before to keep up-to-date with the constantly changing mental health landscape. Using the app will not only save practitioners countless hours of reading time, and ease the guilt of being too busy, but it will also save the industry a lot of money on expensive journal subscriptions.

According to the Mental Elf experts, ‘Evidence Based Mental Health,’ a quarterly journal produced by BMJ, is the only publication available that comes close to supplying the same quality of information as the Mental Elf.

However, as the journal is only produced quarterly, it simply cannot compete with the Mental Elf app in the up-to-date stakes with a yearly subscription costing £109 – a whopping 35 times more than the Mental Elf app.
Professor Sir Muir Gray, Co-Director of the NHS Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) programme and former Chief Knowledge Officer for the NHS, explains that the launch of the Mental Elf app is an important step in transforming how mental health information is shared.

Gray says: “The second mental health revolution will be driven by three forces: citizens, knowledge and the smartphone; this Mental Elf app is great ammunition.”

Dr David Briess, former NHS Psychiatrist, now Medical Director in Neuroscience at Quintiles, a global pioneer in pharmaceutical services, believes the app will help to break down barriers to understanding and reading research.

"Elfin marvellous! Salient, helpful, byte-sized daily mental health morsels that help me easily keep in touch with what's new in the field. It's engaging and will appeal to a wide spectrum of people, helping to break down barriers to understanding research and informing practice.

“The functionality of the app is excellent, it really does make reading and understanding research very easy and useful. I particularly like being able to share the blogs or just make comments. It has been designed exceptionally well.

“I greatly appreciate my daily stocking filler from the Mental Elf! Thanks Minervation."

Managing Director of Minervation, André Tomlin, explains: “We envisage the Mental Elf app will become the must-have essential knowledge tool for all mental health professionals. Psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and social workers are extraordinarily busy, so keeping up-to-date with all the latest research is a daily battle.

“The Mental Elf App brings medical research into the smartphone world. It has been designed to make the life of the mental health practitioner easier. We do all the hard work finding and summarising the very latest information, and then we bring it to you in an accessible and engaging format.

Tomlin adds: “All it takes is three minutes of your day to keep abreast of all the very latest mental health research developments.”

Minervation, created in 2002 by co founders André Tomlin and Douglas Badenoch as a spin-out from Oxford University, specialises in producing highly-relevant evidence-based healthcare information.

It launched the ‘National Elf Service’ website in May this year, which supplies research in medical areas such as mental health, dentistry, diabetes, learning disabilities, musculoskeletal health and healthy lifestyle.

The Mental Elf iPhone app can be downloaded from the Apple Store.

The Android version of the Mental Elf app will be available later in the year.

The company is also in the process of developing apps for all of its National Elf Service websites.