Guy’s gives clinical guidelines via app

A clinical guidelines and hospital contacts app will be introduced at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust before the end of the year.

Dr Chris Floyd, Guy’s and St Thomas’ clinical research fellow and co-founder of app development company Cranworth Medical, said Clinical Iris provides staff with quick easy access to clinical guidelines on their smartphone.

Cranworth already designed the Patient Safety Manual for the trust, which contains more than 50 safety and clinical guidelines and calculates clinical scores. It has been downloaded more than 12,500 times worldwide.

Dr Floyd said the new app will include the trust telephone book and bleep numbers for staff, as well as updated clinical guidelines.

Users have to enter a trust email address to be able to access the information.

Dr Floyd said he believes the app could save around £1,000 per user a year as a result of time savings, and that it should further improve compliance with trust guidelines.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ head of technology Heather O’Brien said the demand for mobile access to information via apps was shown by the high uptake of the trust’s MyVisit App, which was designed for patients to help them when they arrive at the hospital.

The app, which went live 18 months ago, also has contact details for different departments within the trust.

Recently, the chair of the consultant staff committee told her that many junior doctors were using My Visit to get around the organisation and to find contact telephone numbers quickly.

O’Brien met with Cranworth Medical about creating a new app which combines a range of useful information, especially for junior doctors.

“That’s what we believe will be really useful for junior doctors and consultants around the organisation. In the future, perhaps next year, it will link straight to the clinical guidelines database so we don’t have to have anybody uploading to the app,” she added.

O’Brien said the aim was introduce Clinical Iris in a couple of months. “The way that technology has moved on, nearly every single doctor is walking around with a smartphone and they want to use it for what they do,” she said.

The new app will be championed by senior consultants in the trust. “We feel like it’s got to have a life of its own, it’s got to be used,” O’Brien said.