The app

MedChat is a mobile application that facilitates Care Team communication and collaboration, patient clinical information search and exchange, and Care Team alerting.

MedChat is simple to use and intuitive. It combines two of the most popular mobile and web applications in the world: text messaging and information search.

The User Experience

Users of MedChat are care providers. After signing in, MedChat displays the list of patients in the user’s care. The user can organize their patient list by: patient location, their proximity to the user and/or by the last message received. The user selects a patient on this list and enters a chat room containing that patient's Care Team. Members of the chat room are ONLY members of that patient’s Care Team.

Communication and collaboration among the Care Team starts by exchanging messages and clinical information. Using a custom keyboard or by typing keywords in the text field, the user can search clinical information about the patient. The search result is displayed in the Chat Room for the whole Care Team to view. A CareTeam can subscribe to alerts about the patient and they will automatically appear in the Chat Room.

Tapping a button on the upper right corner of the screen displays detailed information about the Care Team members.

All the messages, clinical information and alerts are automatically displayed as bubbles, arranged in a timeline. Information and alerts are clearly differentiated by color: yellow for messages, blue for clinical information and pink for alerts. To get more detailed clinical information, the user taps a blue bubble and a new view appears with more detailed information.

Use Cases

-On the fly communication no matter team location -Ability to query patient data (i.e. lab results) and share with the care team -Efficiency. A huddle can be performed while busy clinicians are not in the same room. -Constant up to date information regarding patient status. -Ability to discuss results and view them simultaneously from any location.

MedChat Architecture

MedChat is based on Service Oriented Architecture. The user interface is simple and is not designed to change. As with search applications such as Google or Siri, improvement to searches and detailed displays are done in the backend.

We built the prototype using Balsamiq, which can be found at the link below. We also built an actual prototype application that works on iOS. The application has group chat functionality with the ability to query patient data and communicate with a care team all from MedChat. The video link below shows some live footage of the app in action. The innovation team should have received a beta invite to the application on test flight.