Ramsay Health app gives doctors more hours in a day

In the world of healthcare, time is everything.

It's why CIO John Sutherland and his team at Ramsay Health are striving to give clinical staff the right tools to best manage their time in an unpredictable hospital environment.

Their new MyPatient+ smartphone app pushes all the information a doctor needs about their patients and their daily schedule to a hand-held device.

The time management solution has been designed in close collaboration with clinical staff to address some of the most acute pain points in hospital workflows.

For example, operating theatre schedules can change frequently throughout a day: patients might pull out, delayed procedures may be held over from previous days, and urgent surgeries may be triaged in.

Beyond the theatre, other doctors' agendas can be altered when a patient is admitted unexpectedly, Sutherland said.

“In obstetrics babies often arrive early, or in geriatrics a patient’s condition can change and require hospitalisation," he said.

“These changes can be highly disruptive for a doctor’s plan for the day."

His team's mobile app means doctors can keep up with changes in real-time, and re-prioritise their activities as soon as possible.

They are also pushed a list of all of their assigned patients and a map of their room locations. Demographic data keeps clinicians abreast of patient specific sensitivities like language, and if a patient has authorised viewing of their national electronic health record, MyPatient+ displays this data via a secure gateway.

Sutherland claims MyPatient+ is the first app in Australia to integrate into the national ehealth records platform.

The app’s features list is set to expand in the coming months and years, with Sutherland already eyeing off outpatient schedules, medical test results, and clinical telemetry.

He said the IT team made a conscious decision to design MyPatient+ as a platform, to be iterated upon and constantly improved and added to.

“It is not merely a collection of patient information on a mobile app for doctors,” Sutherland insisted.

“It has been built as a new platform to deliver future innovation to the doctors."

This project has been named a finalist in the healthcare category of the iTnews Benchmark Awards 2017. View the full list of finalists here.