“Communication Matters – Saving Lives, Saving Money”

DocCom is leading a communication revolution to reconnect healthcare organisations with their junior doctors.

Trainees may be on the frontline of patient care, but from their employers they have never been more remote, working shifts and switching hospitals and specialties as often as every four months. Our research shows nine out of ten acute trusts are struggling to keep in touch with them.

It’s a problem that is costing lives as well as time and money.

DocCom has developed an intelligent 21st century solution. Our DocCom Portal is a web-based system that enables healthcare organisations to keep track of their junior doctors and communicate with them effectively.

Easy to use and integrating with the NHS’s existing IT infrastructure, it acts as both a database and an online central access point for health professionals and their employers.

Whether it’s the latest patient safety announcements, policy and procedure updates, training information or work rotas, DocCom ensures the right information gets to the right people in the right way at the right time.

Inside KnowledgeAt DocCom we understand the challenges faced by healthcare organisations. The DocCom Portal was designed by junior doctors and NHS leaders and developed within an NHS foundation trust.

Leading the WayPoor communication with junior doctors was highlighted in Professor Sir John Tooke’s report on the MMC Inquiry. He called for greater use of electronic technology to ensure trainees were targeted with information that was relevant and essential to them.

We are making this happen now.

About Us

Communication with junior doctors is an important issue

for the NHS. I welcome initiatives such as DocCom’s that seek

to enhance engagement and communication with junior doctors.

Professor Sir John Tooke, Head of UCL Medical School and Chair of MMC Inquiry

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The ProblemCommunication BreakdownJunior doctors have no desk, no landline and no in-tray at work. They can’t always access a computer in hospital and can’t always access work emails at home.

Major recent reforms have only distanced healthcare organisations further from the people delivering most of the country’s day-to-day clinical hospital care.

The result is a communication breakdown with knock-on implications for patient safety, quality of care, cost and efficiency.

We recently carried out a survey of acute NHS trust medical directors. Nine out of ten said they had trouble communicating effectively with their junior doctors*.

With errors and mishaps affecting as many as one-in-ten hospital patients, good communication within the NHS is essential.

Why Has This Happened?Doctors once worked in excess of 100 hours a week in the same hospital alongside the same people. Critical information spread effectively through the close-knit team.

Those days are over. Under the European Working Time Directive, trainees are now restricted to a 48-hour week, usually working in shifts, often with different people each time.

Meanwhile, the Modernising Medical Careers agenda has made the workforce even more mobile, with most juniors rotating between hospitals and specialties every four months.

Information OverloadDoctors are bombarded with information daily. It pours in from all directions and from dozens of sources, including the Department of Health, arms-length bodies, deaneries, trusts and colleagues.

This uncoordinated scattergun approach is not working. One doctor might get a message three times; one might miss out altogether; while a third doctor might get the message but delete it, unable to spot the critical information amid a sea of corporate spam.

There is no effective system to ensure key information is received and read by the relevant people at the right time.

* Research conducted in 2008 by DocCom. Surveys sent to 180 medical directors in England with 50% response rate.

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Messages are sent and received via selected channel:

SMS Texts Email

WWW

Online Networking

The SolutionDocCom provides leading-edge intelligent technology to bridge the communication divide between healthcare organisations and junior doctors.

A Central Access PointThe DocCom Portal is a central access point on the web where healthcare leaders and their employees can find each other and communicate.

It enables organisations to distinguish between junior doctors by grade, specialty and location, and target relevant information to them accordingly.

Crucially, it can record when a message has been received by a doctor. This enables administrators to measure the effectiveness of the communication method and follow up failed communications.

The DocCom Portal takes advantage of web, mobile, email and networking technology to pass on information by the channel most appropriate to individual doctors, making it fast and efficient.

The result is that the right information gets to the right people at the right time in the right way.

The Virtual In-TrayDocCom provides an intelligent virtual in-tray for healthcare professionals.

Doctors select their preferred communication method.

Messages arrive via that chosen channel.

Administrators receive confirmation that the message has been opened.

A back-up of relevant communication is filed in the DocCom virtual in-tray where messages are separated into categories so that doctors can easily find and search them at any time.

The in-tray also creates a professional network through which doctors can find and message each other.

Targeted CommunicationBy allowing healthcare organisations to target information to specific groups, DocCom all but eliminates the trivial communication that gridlocks so many email inboxes.

Our system also empowers junior doctors to alert organisations to irrelevant messages.

Safe and EasyThe DocCom Portal is safe, secure and easy to set up and use with minimal training .

It works in synergy with the NHS’s existing IT infrastructure, integrating with features such as NHSMail’s free texting service.

SMS Texts Email Online Networking

WWW

Why Choose DocCom?

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The DocCom Portal has universal benefits for healthcare professionals, and therefore for patients.

✓ It provides excellent two-way communication

✓ It ensures critical information is targeted to the right person at the right time

✓ It provides an easy mechanism for frontline staff to give feedback to clinical leaders

✓ It is easy to use and fully supported

Universal Benefits: ✓ It helps you improve patient safety, productivity and the quality of care

✓ It enables you to measure the effectiveness of the communication process

✓ It is an inexpensive solution that will save you time and money

✓ It is easy to install and use, and full training is provided

✓ It has no hardware requirements and integrates with existing IT infrastructure

✓ It improves staff productivity

Organisation Benefits:

✓ It ensures critical information reaches them

✓ It ensures they receive relevant information only

✓ It acts as a central access point for all information related to their job and training

✓ It lets them select their preferred method of communication

✓ It is accessible whether they are at work or at home

✓ It makes their life easier

Junior Doctor Benefits:

✓ It saves them time

✓ It enables them to keep track of who has opened a message and who hasn’t

✓ It ensures healthcare professionals take responsibility for their part in the communication process

✓ Full training is provided as well as support via phone, email and the web

✓ It makes their job easier

Administrator Benefits:

DocCom understands the challenges we face, and our

collaboration with them will give us a unique opportunity to target critical patient safety information

directly to doctors on the frontline.

Dr Kevin Cleary, Medical Director of the National Patient Safety Agency

DocCom’s mission is to foster communication excellence in the health service by harnessing the best of 21st century technology.

Tackling the communication breakdown between junior doctors and healthcare organisations was our starting point.

Now our intelligent solutions can be applied to other health professionals and to address other problems aggravated by poor communication, such as the national locum shortage.

Those who have tried, tested and introduced DocCom have done so for the simple reason that it will save lives and money.

We are happy to visit you in person to discuss DocCom, or answer any questions by email or telephone.

Please contact Dr Jonathan Bloor or Arthur Haynes:

info@doccom.info

0117 903 1131

WWW

www.doccom.info

What Next?

DocCom will improve the way we communicate with our junior doctors, benefiting both the trust and our patients. I am impressed

with their excellent insight and firmly believe their system is an important step forward that will

benefit the wider NHS.

John Savage, Chairman of University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust

Doctor Communication Solutions Ltd

University Gate East, Park Row, Bristol BS1 5UB

t: 0117 903 1131

www.doccom.info

© 2010 Doctor Communication Solutions Ltd