Here is the messaging app specification recently developed by University Hospitals Southampton NHS Foundation Trust; it will be invaluable for anyone in NZ considering doing the same:
I obtained this from NHS England’s Global Digital Exemplar Blueprint site, and we are free to share it. This is a somewhat poorly organised collection of some incredibly valuable stuff that could save us all a bunch of time. If anyone is interested in taking a look at it themselves then email these guys:
From: gdeblueprints NHSX gdeblueprints@nhsx.nhs.uk Sent: 24 July 2019 10:05 To: KERSHAW, Nathan (UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS BIRMINGHAM NHS FOUNDATION TRUST) Subject: Re: Blueprint access
Hello Nathan,
We would be happy to share Blueprints and share learning with New Zealand and colleagues all over the world. They can always reach us at this email address, and to give access to the platform we just need their email addresses.
Many thanks
Kasia Janowska
Programme Support Officer
Blueprinting Team Technology Strategy
Operations and Information Directorate
NHS England
7E60/Quarry House/Leeds/ LS2 7UE
Tel +44 7917 752 459
If anyone is looking for a certified and legal secure messaging app I’ve had good experiences with celo health and medium experiences with forward health.
I say this purely as a clinician end user, I have no interest in either company.
Yes thanks Stuart, but not a deep look; there are now a plethora of similar applications out there.
What I haven’t yet seen is a successful implementation widely across an organisation which leverages its full potential - especially with clinical image taking, pager replacement, task management, and EPR integration.
What you need is Janet Liang’s theory about what to consider when selecting this kind of app. It works like a very nice little framework of the things to think
about. It’s still in PhD format (publications in pipeline) but check out Chapter 9 for the description of her theory and a digram to help you visualise it.
I recommend you get in touch with Janet to discuss this theory.
Over to you Janet to take the conversation further.
Happy to chat with yourself or anyone else re ward based clinician messaging, as I’ve spent a considerable amount of time studying it for my thesis. What I identified is not just focused on clinician technological requirements, but why those requirements exist and how they might be met.
I came to ask a question about this, but found this thread - hope it’s okay to join in.
It seems to me that the horse has truly bolted on this topic. Every team has its own group chat on FB messenger or WhatsApp.
Would I be right in thinking there’s a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” approach? We’ve all signed social media polices that mean we could be fired for what we do routinely every day. Probably many staff haven’t even realised that messaging on these platforms would be against the rules.
A better approach might be to say “we know this stuff is happening, and we aren’t here to make your lives more difficult. Make sure that your team chat is on [insert name of app here] so that it is searchable, and if we are investigating an incident we will look at your phone and see what everyone’s said”.
I haven’t used it much, but the best app might be Slack (it’s an acronym of Searchable Log Of All Content and Knowledge).
Or, the hospital could create a profile for each app, and require that “the hospital” is a silent member of each group.
This seems much easier and more realistic than having some special platform.
You have summed up the problem nicely, Martin. And the cognitive dissonance of being essentially forced to do something forbidden in order to do our jobs is intolerable. We have done this in the absence of a fit-for-purpose tool. It is the same in the UK.
Teams (made by Microsoft) is looking the easiest solution for DHB use in NZ, as it is integrated with the existing systems in DHBs and is included in our nationally negotiated agreement with Microsoft (I believe). Most of the others don’t have sufficient privacy/security or EHR integration to be twisted to this purpose, although there are many specifically developed health ones out there (all small enterprises eg Celo, MedXNote, Forward, etc).
The thing is it takes an enormous amount of investment (not money per se but staff time) and deep clinical engagement for any platform to succeed in this space - and displace WhatsApp / Facebook / Slack / etc . I have witnessed many (very) partial successes in the UK, which is really disappointing.
