Provider Hacks

A Community platform for crowdsourced "hacks" (workarounds, time-savers, novel methods) to enhance provider work flow efficiency and increase patient experience.

We are working to develop an internal platform that will enable us to disseminate crowdsourced hacks (from all levels of staff across the health system) as they relate to clinical duties, patient experience, operations and logistics of being care providers. Similar to Wikipedia and open access medical education sources, we want to share free knowledge and encourage providers to contribute their own best practices with sense of reciprocity. We hope to increase adoption rates of these best practices and reduce variations in practices that lead to poor experience for both patients and providers. Additionally, we want to create an informal community where care providers feel like they can focus on their personal findings in how they establish connections with their patients. 

We want to gather these hacks using different mechanisms through the platform, including a “Hack Hotline” and a “Hack Administrator” who will initially help quality control the information being shared. 

Some hacks we’ve gathered though initial pilots and provider interviews include:

• Reading a patient’s notes out loud as they are typed so the patient can follow along.
• Encourage inpatients/their families to write questions on the whiteboard so they don’t have to worry about remembering them when the team checks in on him/her; make small white boards available for less mobile patients. Have care team be sure to address these questions.
• When using fluorescent dye to detect corneal abrasions, instead of using the strip on the inner eye lid, place the strip into a 5ml saline syringe. This will make the eye disperse more easily and be more comfortable for the patient. it will also reduce the chance of exacerbating the abrasion.
• Bring/provide a folding stool upon which residents/attendings can sit in the hospital room or adjust the height of the patient’s bed to get the patient closer to the attending’s face

A solution of a crowdsourcing platform works to solve the Challenge because it's leveraging the experience and skills of diverse providers (potentially from health systems all over the world) to disseminate these insights to other providers and care givers. 

The "Hacks" crowdsourcing platform will need to be accessed by providers (whether they're on a desktop computer during shift or on their mobile device on their way home). Eventually, we want to be able to ping and notify providers with tailored hacks depending on their location and the type of patient (according to their illness, location in the hospital, etc) to provide real-time insights into how they can enhance their decision making. The dashboard needs to exist as a robust, searchable database so providers can feel that it is approachable and usable in their current work flow. 

Have the platform live as a native app so we can leverage push notifications based on user location and to reach participation from multiple service lines (Emergency Department, Primary Care, Neurology, Cardiology and MSK).