What you need to know
- Careful is a new app from a healthcare startup.
- It is designed to make the process of handover in hospitals safer and more effective.
- Of the 15% of wasted hospital expenditure due to adverse events, 80% of this goes on problems caused by poor handovers as doctors and nurses change shifts.
A new healthcare startup has created an app it says could save health services millions by streamlining the process of handover as doctors and nurses change shifts.
Careful is a new app from a healthcare startup designed to help reduce the dangers of handovers in hospitals and other healthcare facilities, reducing not only wasted time and money but also saving the lives of patients. In a press release the company stated:
Thousands of patients are dying every year and hospitals are wasting up to 15% of their entire budget as a result of poor handover. The UK NHS wastes at least £250m a year from delays to discharge, and the same problem is seen in hospitals throughout the world. Today, healthcare start-up CAREFUL has launched its platform to help make handover safe, save lives and speed-up patient flow in hospitals by making discharges quicker to save costs and improve care.
As Careful notes, handover is a vital process in any hospital, where the responsibility for patients is transferred from one team to another, taking place thousands of times a week in every hospital. The app is designed to eliminate the use of "inefficient, informal communication systems" like paper, sticky notes, and WhatsApp messages. the WHO estimates that 15% of all hospital expenditure "is wasted on adverse events that happen to patients – and that 80% of these are due to poor handover."
The app is a digital platform that lets clinicians capture and update health data and records of patients, ensuring visibility and accountability as well as collaboration.
The app has been tested in a hospital in London, and one doctor at Newham hospital says the app "fills a huge gap where Electronic Patient Record systems perform poorly" and would benefit "every care team in the NHS."
The app is encrypted and can be integrated with healthcare systems globally. "All these headaches can be solved quickly and easily with Careful," said Dr. DJ Hamblin-Brown, Founder & CEO of the company. "CAREFUL is a simple-to-use and easy-to-implement application which helps hospitals communicate internally, and also with patients and their families". If Careful truly is an app that can save all this money and patients' lives, then it could be one of the most important iPhone apps ever created.
