What is the NRAS Health Wallet?

The NRAS Health Wallet is an easy-to-use smart-phone health and wellness app for people living with RA and Adult JIA which has been co-produced by over 150 NRAS volunteers during the period November 2024 – end of 2025 as part of a real-world study with our UK technology partner, COHESION Medical.

Here is an animation about the NRAS Health Wallet which explains what it does.

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How will it help me?

The NRAS Wallet is a more flexible approach to managing complex long-term condition like RA or Adult JIA, which the user can adapt to their own personal needs, circumstances and health and wellbeing journey.

With secure biometric login (equivalent to a banking app), the NRAS Health Wallet enables the user to monitor and manage their disease, not only logging symptoms, but with the ability to do so much more, including completing DAS scores, monitoring other vital signs such as blood pressure, sleep patterns, mood, logging vaccinations, medications etc.
The ability to manage co-morbidities is an important capability within the Wallet with a disease like RA which carries a higher risk of developing other conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis etc.

You can control what matters to you, connect wearable tech to record activity, carry out periodic health needs assessments and complete patient reported outcome questionnaires.
With an AI enabled health assistant, you can ask questions and get answers from verified sources of information such as NHS, NICE, BSR, NRAS websites and others.

Helping NRAS to better support you

As NRAS is connected to your Health Wallet, NRAS can push messages, information, and resources such as the NRAS National Helpline and our SMILE-RA e-learning programme to individuals or groups of users enabling them to be directly accessed from your Wallet.

Evidencing your health to your care team

All your key health stats can be easily displayed on your dashboard to help you evidence your health for showing and sharing with your clinical team.
This helps and facilitates patient recall over time which is especially important in an era of Patient Initiated Follow-Up, when people are seeing their health professional team less often, enabling people to record data which their team would otherwise not have access to.

Co-designing to build trust and confidence

Since 2018, NRAS and COHESION have collaborated together with NHS and other community-based organisations on a variety of digital health projects. Together there is a shared vision for patient or citizen driven health care where the citizen owns and manages their own data and can flexibly connect and share their data within community and acute healthcare settings.

In 2022/23, supported by The Health Foundation, we explored with COHESION how to build trust and confidence between patients and their rheumatology team using the NRAS Health Wallet as a digital remote monitoring solution.

This phase of work was exceptionally insightful, helping to co-design the NRAS Health Wallet specifically for the RA community and which has been recognized as a great exemplar of enabling citizens to shape their own solutions for other immune mediated inflammatory conditions.

This collaboration has attracted high-profile interest from The Health Foundation and the King’s Fund following our collaboration with Digital Rheumatology Scotland.

You can read more about this work here:

Designing Inclusive Digital Health Services With Communities | The King’s Fund

Trust and confidence in technology-enabled care | The Health Foundation

Beta-testing the NRAS Health Wallet

We started a pilot of the new NRAS Health Wallet at the end of 2024 which will run to the end of 2025 and already have over 100 volunteers involved in this project and have occasional group feedback sessions.

With the aid of the NRAS Health Wallet, you will be able to keep track of your disease between appointments and use it to evidence your health and wellness to improve your conversations and interactions with your rheumatology and GP/community based clinical teams.

You are probably well aware how challenged rheumatology services are post pandemic and that you may be seeing your team less often than before the pandemic, so having the ability to keep track of your symptoms and how you are between appointments has perhaps never been more important.

You will also be connected to NRAS where you will receive prompts for self-management and be able to access NRAS services, resources and events.

Getting involved – more testers wanted!

We are now looking for a limited number of further ‘testers’ to take part in the current pilot. The voluntary role involves using the app at least once a week and providing feedback on functionality and what you may want from an app like this.
You don’t need to be highly proficient with using smart phone apps as there will be self-explanatory introductory and training videos to help you get started – it’s deliberately designed to be intuitive to use. The only requirement is that you are 18 years or older, living with RA or Adult JIA and have a smart phone no older than 6/7 years.

To get involved and help us with the development of the NRAS Health Wallet, please complete the following form, which will also give you more details of what the pilot entails:

Be part of citizen science

With the NRAS Health Wallet, citizens like you can drive citizen science through permissioned use of anonymised real world data to help researchers better understand RA disease activity as well as how to improve clinical pathways and health outcomes.
If you would like to learn more how clinical teams can use data from the NRAS Wallet, please email Ailsa Bosworth at ailsa@nras.org.uk

Feedback from people involved

“Really comprehensive tool to help me manage my long-term conditions.”
“Helps me to record and monitor my symptoms, medication and feelings. ”
“What a great project. This will speed up my care and the speed of my treatment. Priceless!”
“A really good communication tool for patients to communicate with health clinicians.”
“The App is brilliant. It’s great having an electronic DAS as well.”
“Will help with my anxiety when symptoms occur.”
“There’s loads I like about it.”
“Love it! Exciiiiited! Woop woop :)”
“Its fab good.”

What a terrific idea this is – incredibly useful app with great potential to help patients and professionals

If you would like to get involved in this pilot project, please submit your interest here. https://nras.tfaforms.net/5047271 or if you have any general questions, please contact our Research Coordinator research@nras.org.uk

April 2025