Problem

Effective hospital care requires coordination among multiple individuals including therapists, care coordinators, primary teams, consult teams, and nurses. Unfortunately, this coordination is costly to frontline staff often requiring much time and many steps even to identify the appropriate contact. Existing solutions have significant shortcomings without a highly-available best practice.

Solution

Squire is a secure web and mobile directory of indexed, annotated contacts that allows for rapid identification of and communication among clinical staff leveraging existing hospital telecommunications infrastructure. Clinicians can use Squire’s searchable interface to find a contact then directly send a page or initiate a phone call. Squire is now widely used among Brigham and Women’s Hospital physicians, has cut Time to Contact down to 1/3rd, and improved the availability of hard-to-reach clinical services.

Challenges

• Fully responsive web and mobile technology
• Integration with dynamic paging directory
• Change management in getting physicians to try a new tool
• Fully complies with Partners HealthCare security requirements
• Maintaining an accurate list of back office phone numbers

Honors

• Finalist for MMS Information Technology Award — Presentation
• See Awards and Honors