ED App: The Emergency Department Guidelines App – Version One Released
After many months of hard work, early starts, late nights and countless hours spent in ED’s, we’re very proud to have ‘completed’ development of ED App version one: Packed with features designed to improve efficiency, support patient safety and standardisation of care; we hope you love it as much as we do!
Development Team: Our core development team are truly unique; they’re all originally highly skilled IT graduates, who later went on to train and qualify as registered healthcare professionals. This gives them a unique insight shared by no other development team and enables them to develop solutions that solve real-world healthcare problems.
ED App was created to fill a need identified by a local ED in mid 2020: Aging IT infastructure; relative parcety of computers; new COVID-19 regulations regarding to social distancing and restricting movement of staff between areas; and the requirement to minimise contamination on shared equipment, meant that a portable, mobile, rapidly accessible ED guideline platform was required. Enter ED App!
Our core development team are truly unique; they’re all originally highly skilled IT graduates, who later went on to train and qualify as registered healthcare professionals.
Emergency Medicine Guidelines: Our launch version of ED App – The Emergency Department (ED) Guidelines App, contained 138 emergency medicine guidelines. All of which were immediately accessible from any device with an internet connection, in seconds. A 2016 study found that emergency department guidelines are available 116 seconds quicker on a mobile app than they are using desktop computers (Penders and Mallet, 2016). In a busy ED, guidelines are accessed at least once every fifteen minutes. Staggeringly, over a year, this saves 1125 hours! We continued to work closely with local ED’s, and with their feedback expanded content to include discharge support; a list of discharge pathways, criteria and contact details, immediately available to clinicians in the palm of their hand and then went on to do the same for outpatient clinics.
ED guidelines are available 116 seconds quicker on a mobile app than they are a desktop computer… Staggeringly, over a year, this saves 1125 hours!
ED App is available on any device with an internet connection!
Patient leaflets: In the COVID-19 world of social distancing and no-contact, emergency departments’ are seeking modern day alternatives to patient leaflets, that support the ongoing ambition of the NHS to achieve paperless solutions. Our ED App Emergency Department App now includes a patient leaflet section; patient leaflets can be sent to patients using their email address, or they can use a camera on their mobile device to scan a barcode on the clinicians phone, to load the leaflet on their own device immediately.
What does this mean? More patients receive patient leaflets; patient expectations are better managed; consistency of care is increased and fewer patients return to the emergency department.
References:
Penders, R. and Mallet, M., 2016. Survive On Call – A QI Project to Improve Access to Hospital Clinical Guidelines. BMJ Quality Improvement Reports, 5(1), pp.u210274.w4363.