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FiveP Australia, a Melbourne-based Microsoft Gold partner, has launched Baret to help solve one of the most common communication challenges for frontline workers across the healthcare industry.
Baret is a role-based messaging solution that allows structured communication across clinical and frontline workers in hospitals and care settings.
The application was built inside Microsoft Teams and was developed with input from Melbourne-based health service Austin Health, where it is now being utilised.
With FiveP Australia’s digital solution, common communications challenges relating to patient care, such as knowing who is available to be contacted for information and assistance and being able to reach them in time-sensitive situations, can now be resolved.
“We have different individuals rotating through the same clinical role within a 24hr period. It can be challenging and time-consuming to find the person who is performing the rotational clinical role that you need to speak to at a given time,” Austin Health’s Operations Director Radiology & MIT Nicole Hosking said.
“From my perspective, we now have so many different clinical communication methods available across the health industry that staff may not always be using the same platform as their colleagues. We’re running a pilot project in Radiology at Austin Health to rationalise and streamline how we communicate with each other as a healthcare team.”
The creation of the communication app had its roots in the rapid deployment of Microsoft Teams at Austin Health in early 2020 as a response to the pandemic. Austin Health needed its office staff, who were working remotely at the time, to collaborate with clinical staff working in and around the COVID wards.
Austin Health was looking for solutions to role-based communications when FiveP Australia noticed that some of the clinical use cases were appearing as a result of their Microsoft Teams adoption.
This then led them to develop a basic communications prototype to illustrate how it could be done leveraging the full power of communication on Teams.
Austin Health’s Director for EMR and ICT Services Alan Pritchard stated that the use of Teams for the application was utilised as it was already embedded into their corporate communication platform.
“Everybody’s using it and we’re already licenced for all users. The idea that we could solve another business problem with this same technology that we already have was very appealing,” He said.
“After being embedded with us for a year and a half, FiveP completely understood the problem, because they’d lived and breathed the Modern Workplace transition throughout the hospital and got to know a lot of people through that process. When they came to us and said, ‘We think we can solve this problem. Would you like to work on this with us?’, the obvious answer for me was ‘Yes’.”
FiveP’s experience in developing solutions on the Microsoft Teams platform has enabled the integration of Baret with EMR/PAS patient information systems, while also keeping the app simple and intuitive for users.
“There is presently increased complexity and increased demand in health services, within an environment that incorporates phones, paging systems, email, intranets, multiple specialty clinical software applications and more,” GM of Modern Workplace for FiveP and Baret product lead Jane Prowse said.
“What Baret represents is the ability to replace multiple communication methods with a single tool and introduce a far more streamlined approach to clinical communication, whilst elevating what’s possible across communication channels for our healthcare workers and allowing them to focus more on direct patient care.”
Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft Australia and New Zealand Dr Nic Woods stated that workplace communication in healthcare has fundamentally changed due to the increase of digitisation and the pandemic.
“Increasing digitisation and a pandemic have influenced new care delivery models, with demand on the health system at an all-time high and an urgent need to effectively communicate across teams. Much of the status quo experience heavily rely on pagers and phone calls,” he said.
“To arm clinical and operational teams with better tools, FiveP has done an excellent job in developing this role-based messaging capability in partnership with Austin Health that facilitates critical information across individuals and teams while leveraging the familiarity and access of Microsoft Teams. I am delighted by this initiative and the impact it is already having in helping clinical teams do their work during incredibly challenging times.”
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