Doctors are not inherently tech savvy, but their smartphones are as familiar as their stethescopes. So, to ensure that patients got the best diagnoses and treatment recommendations from the most qualified specialists, the most appropriate drugs when doctors overlooked certain patient restrictions, and the fastest care when patient loads exceeded the norm, University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB) sought mobile solutions. Yet their initial research convinced them that mobile development, maintenance, and updates were far too costly.
Webalo changed their perceptions. In ninety minutes, a UHB IT employee created a mobile referral system that lets physicians request assistance from specialists who receive the request on their smartphones, look up patient and clinical and research data directly from their smartphones, and send recommendations back the attending physician – recommendations that are simultaneously posted in the patient’s permanent record. Those records also let pharmacists check each prescription to ensure the patient can take the requested drug and, if not, use a Webalo-enabled service on their smartphones to find a suitable alternative. In the hospital itself, Webalo-empowered real time mobile updates let administrators know when service delivery times are declining so they can re-deploy or allocate staff to ensure timely treatment.
With Webalo, UHB is practising mobilized medicine efficiently, effectively and, perhaps just as importantly, affordably.
