UH Bristol pushes ‘WhatsApp-style’ care co-ordination app to 1,000 clinicians
- 1 August 2018
System C’s CareFlow Connect app has been rolled out to clinicians at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust to help link up care teams and reduce the organisation’s reliance on paper.
CareFlow Connect has been pushed to some 1,050 clinicians across all nine of the trust’s sites, following a pilot stage that ran in 2017.
Dr Jon Shaw, System C’s director of clinical strategy and design, said it was “very gratifying to see this level and speed of take-up”.
The platform allows clinicians to manage patient care from a mobile device, share tasks and medical information with other care teams and exchange instant messages, WhatsApp-style.
Care teams at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust (UH Bristol) have been using CareFlow Connect to remove paper from handover processes as well as to identify patients in need of more urgent care, or those who are from outside the area.
Chris Bourdeaux, consultant anaesthetist and chief clinical information officer (CCIO) at UH Bristol, said: “The ability to self-organise and communicate as a team wherever you are, using your own phone, and to know when information has been received and read – these are powerful benefits for clinicians and care professionals.
“We are all delighted to reduce reliance on pagers and email, with all the inefficiencies they have involved.”
Bourdeaux suggested the clinical teams had also discovered more novel uses of the app, such as using it to collaborate with other paediatric cardiology teams in South West England and improving patient recruitment into research studies.
“We continue to be surprised by the wealth of benefits and uses our colleagues are finding for the app,” he said. “It really has been revolutionary.”
CareFlow Connect is integrated with UH Bristol’s existing clinical systems, with clinical conversations generated by the app automatically uploaded into the patient’s electronic health record.
Dr Shaw said: “The key focus for us in developing CareFlow has been clinical usability and creating something which is genuinely useful for clinicians and helps with patient care.”
11 Comments
It would be interesting to hear what the ‘Whatsapp’ functionality is like in practice- especially as Whatsapp have just announced that it is starting to charge.
Let’s hope nothing is stored on the device like WhatsApp….this would be whole load of no!
Sounds a great project. I think Bristol also have Vitalpac/ Vials e-Obs, I wonder if these two systems link up together, it would be so good to see an in depth article about both systems’ features and what effort it took to deploy it. Those of us in the last few paper-based hospitals could try to bring it to our organisation’s awareness then, people need to see what is possible nowadays while they still clutch onto the past.
I hope that’s a dummy patient in the feature image.
you would think so but the nhs number passes validation checks. Looks like someone slipped up. ICO fine on its way?
We and our customers take patient confidentiality extremely seriously, and would like to confirm that this is a made-up patient, a made-up doctor and a made-up NHS number.
The image shows a patient from the CareFlow Connect test service, and yes, it is a ‘valid’ NHS number – ie it conforms to the Modulus 11 algorithm, and was generated using one of the many online tools available to help generate Modulus 11 conforming numbers for testing purposes. The name, date of birth and doctor are fictitious.
🙂 Just keeping you on your toes.
@NHSally – Definitely worth exploring the market beyond Bristol. There are suppliers out there that have all of this and more covered and within 1 system. Interoperability internally to certain suppliers is a current challenge to be aware of.
@CliniTech – can you suggest systems that provide it all please?
Sure thing. This is my own opinion, but Cerner and Epic are the 2 that come to mind when thinking about it all. Other’s come close. Be careful of those organisations that have expanded their product suite through acquisition.
I checked it out also against national Spine and can confirm it’s a dummy ID.
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