Healthcare Shorts: On Call Messaging App

Providers need to streamline secure messaging by providing a one-stop-shop that shows a filterable list of doctors on call and allows the doctor to quickly contact them via chat, calling, or text.

The problem is that people cannot memorize the on-call schedule and many times must be physically printed out each day. Sometimes there is a digital version but not easily accessible when needed. However, they are still printing off the list of support doctors on a piece of paper and referring to it when searching for the doctor in Teams. This is slowing down the process and is time-consuming for the clerk to print for each doc as their shift starts.

The business case is to reduce the time to engage specialists, in turn reducing the time the patient is in the hospital and reducing the noise from PA systems. The doctors all have smartphones, using wearables to get notifications therefore creating a chat app that is accessible on any device will help improve this process. Having the ability to quickly escalate for a voice or video call could reduce the need for an on-call physician needing to stop what they are doing to travel to the patient's locations.

We built a PowerApp in Teams that allows a user to quickly access a list of on-call doctors and filter them by building department, and on-call status. Once they find the correct Physician, they are linked to them in MS Teams. Using Teams features the two individuals can chat, voice or video call to assess the patient situation to determine the next course of action.

For this solution, we used MS Teams Dataverse for our data source of the on-call schedules, but we could easily connect to a 3rd party data source using Power Apps Premium connector to pull in an existing on-call schedule. 

Thanks for reading, Shelly Avery |Email, LinkedIn 

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