Mike Wuerthele
A new iPhone and iPad app deployed at the Boston Children's Hospital aims to cut back on the pile of physical paper generated by healthcare as part of doing business — and increase the amount of time that physicians and other caregivers can spend taking care of patients.
The Dock Help app and associated service was developed in response to providers being "buried in e-mails, Post-it notes, and administrative tasks." As a result of the paper stack, a recently published study says that physicians spend an average of two hours of desk work for every hour of patient care.
The fully HIPPA-compliant app provides secure message aggregation, patient care detail coordination, accountability chains of communications, in addition to the core work list and task management features.
The app is available on Apple's iOS or on the web, but isn't native to Google's Android.
The app is being piloted in the Boston Children's Hospital gastroenterology, allergy/immunology, orthopedics and General Pediatrics departments. External pilot programs are set to begin shortly
The app is being demonstrated at the Health 2.0 Conference in California, and will be shown in Boston at HubWeek on Oct. 10.
Marko Zivkovic
Christine McKee
Andrew Orr
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Amber Neely
2 Comments
I'm surprised nobody has commented on this yet. My daughter works at a large hospital and their system sucks big time. Having something like this could only improve the medical personnel's input and access to patient information, something all patients regularly complain about. The fact it's already HIPPA compliant means a lot when dealing with all the government regulations meant to protect our personal information.
"For every hour physicians provide direct clinical face time to patients, nearly 2 additional hours are spent on EHR and desk work within the clinic day." From Dock Help link above. This is absolutely true and my daughter's management gives them precious little time to document everything they do because it's just not billable.
Oh God, give the doctors Apple-centric software running on Apple hardware, please! I retired from the practice of emergency medicine two years ago, after a decade of hoping that I could eventually create documentation on decent software programs, running on Apple hardware. Alas, it was not to be. One of the factors in my retirement was my disgust at having to do a second shift of data entry after each shift of patient care. Doctors, you should only have one job. Demand the best.