JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

We present the results of a 22-month study, in which all staff at a hospital begun using a smartphone platform to manage and execute clinical workflows. The platform enables structured communication between staff (unlike SMS, WhatsApp, etc.), and it does not incorporate patient records.

Objective:

We seek to identify whether the structure of the collected communication data provides insights into the hospital’s workflows. Our analysis also aims to identify ways in which task management platforms can be improved and designed to better support clinical workflows.

Methods:

We present an exploratory analysis of clinical task records collected through a smartphone application. We collected over 300,000 task records between July 2018 and May 2020 completed by staff members including doctors, nurses and pharmacists across all wards in an Australian hospital.

Results:

We show that important insights on how teams function in a clinical setting can be readily drawn from task assignment data. Our analysis indicates that pre-defined labels such as urgency and task type are important, and impact how tasks are accepted and completed. Our results show that both task sent-to-accepted (P < .001) and sent-to-completed (P < .001) times are significantly higher for routine tasks when compared to urgent tasks. We also show how task acceptance varies across teams and roles, and that when compared to external tasks, internal tasks are more efficiently managed possibly due to increased trust among team members. For example, task sent-to-accepted time (minutes) is significantly higher (P < .001) for external assignments (mean 22.10; SD 91.45) when compared to internal assignments (mean 19.03; SD 82.66).

Conclusions:

Smartphone based task assignment applications can provide unique insights into team dynamics in clinical settings. These insights can be used to further improve how well these systems support clinical work and staff.