JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has significantly altered the delivery of healthcare, requiring clinicians and hospitals to adapt to rapidly changing hospital policies, as well as social distancing guidelines. To help address these challenges, we adapted an existing mobile app to communicate hospital policies, as well as enable direct communication between clinical team members and hospitalized patients.

Objective:

To describe the features and utilization of a novel mobile application.

Methods:

We implemented moblMD, a mobile app for iOS and Android. We worked with our Hospital Incident Command System to identify key policies to distribute using the app. The app was also populated with a searchable directory of numbers to patient bedside phones and hospital locations. We monitored anonymized user activity from February 1 – July 31, 2020.

Results:

Following its announcement the app was downloaded by a total of 1104 clinicians during the observation period, with 504 downloads within 72 hours of the first announcement. Review of COVID policies using the app was most common during the first week. Users made sustained use of hospital phone dialing features throughout the observation period and its use mirrored hospital activity and call center volume trends.

Conclusions:

We were able to rapidly develop and deploy a communication-focused mobile app in the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic that has demonstrated initial and sustained value for clinicians in communicating with inpatients and each other in the context of social distancing.