Installing the CDSS on your phone

What Installing Does

The CDSS can sit on the home screen beside the other applications on the phone, and open in its own window with no browser bar around it.

Nothing is downloaded from an app store, and there is no account to create. The steps below put a shortcut on the home screen and tell the phone to treat the pages as an application. It takes about fifteen seconds and can be undone by deleting the icon.

One tap from the home screen No address to type on a ward round

Opens without the network Any tool already opened once opens again with no signal

Updates itself A corrected dose arrives on the next visit, with nothing to reinstall

Almost no storage The pages you open, and nothing else

The Steps

The tab is picked from the device you are reading this on, and the guess is sometimes wrong. Switch it if you are reading on a different device from the one you want to install on.

Android iPhone and iPad

1 Open the CDSS in Chrome

Go to mediscuss.org/cdss in Chrome. Edge, Brave and Samsung Internet work the same way. Look at the top of the home page, beside the count of active tools.

The button sits beside the tool count.

2 Tap Install App

Chrome asks you to confirm, showing the name and the icon. Tap Install.

If no Install App button is showing, the CDSS is most likely already on the home screen. If it is not, the same thing is available from Chrome's own menu, the three dots at the top right, as Add to Home screen or Install app.

Confirm with Install.

3 Open it from the home screen

The icon appears on the home screen and in the app drawer. Opening it from there gives the full screen, with no address bar taking up the top of a small display.

To remove it later, press and hold the icon and choose to uninstall it, exactly as with any other application.

It behaves like any other app.

1 Open the CDSS in Safari, then tap Share

Go to mediscuss.org/cdss in Safari. The iPhone shows no Install button of its own, so the whole thing is done from the Share menu.

The Share button is a square with an arrow pointing up out of it. On an iPhone it is in the bar along the bottom of the screen; on recent versions of iOS it has moved behind the three dots beside the address bar. On an iPad it is at the top right.

The Share button in the bottom bar.

2 Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen

The Share menu opens from the bottom. The first part of it is a row of applications to send the page to; the list you want is below that, and Add to Home Screen usually sits a little way down it. Scroll the list, do not scroll the row of applications.

Below the row of applications.

3 Leave Open as Web App on, then tap Add

A confirmation screen shows the icon and the name, which you can shorten if you wish. Add is at the top right.

Recent versions of iOS also show a switch marked Open as Web App, or Install as Web App on some releases. It is on by default and should be left on. Turning it off makes the icon an ordinary Safari bookmark: it will still open the CDSS, but inside the browser rather than in its own window, and it will not open when there is no signal.

Leave the switch on, then Add.

If Something Is Not Where It Should Be

No Install App button on Android. The button appears only when the browser offers to install, so it is hidden if the CDSS is already on the home screen. Chrome's own menu, the three dots at the top right, carries Add to Home screen in that case.
No Add to Home Screen on the iPhone. Chrome and Edge on iOS offer it from their own Share button on recent versions, but Safari is the one that always has it. If you are in another browser and cannot find the row, open the page in Safari and start again.
On a computer. Chrome and Edge show a small install symbol at the right-hand end of the address bar, and the same Install App button works. Safari on a Mac uses File, then Add to Dock. Firefox does not install web applications, and the CDSS works normally in it as a website.
Removing it. Press and hold the icon and delete it, as with any other application. Nothing is left behind on the phone beyond the pages the browser had already cached.

What This Is, and What It Is Not

This is the website, kept on the home screen. It is not an application from the Play Store or the App Store, it has not been through their review, and it is not a regulated medical device. The tools, the content and the disclaimer are exactly the same as in the browser.

Values you enter into a tool stay on the device, whether the CDSS is installed or not, and are discarded when you close the tab. Installing changes nothing about that. The one exception is a calculation you deliberately save while signed in, and the privacy notice sets out exactly what that stores and for how long.

If a step above does not match what you see on your phone, please tell us. The screens change between releases, and a page describing the wrong ones is worth correcting.

Tell us what you see