A Review of Cureatr: A Medical Professional Social Messenger App

Overview

Cureatr is a social media application designed for medical professionals to expedite healthcare communications.  It is HIPAA-compliant and works much like other messenger services like Facebook Messenger and Viber.

It represents an alternative to the traditional beeping a colleague or using the loudspeakers throughout the hospital to locate the person of interest.  

Features

Cureatr is a well-conceived idea and addresses a ever-present dilemma faced in the medicals wards across the world. Communication is a topic constantly addressed during staff meetings and can often be the main reason for mismanagement of patients during changeovers or when a nurse is not up-to-date on the current management plan of a patient.  

Once downloaded by a user and the staff around the hospital, the team will be able to message each other on the most current plans for each patient. The messenger system is very similar to Facebook Messenger and provides a nice alternative to paging beepers constantly to get in contact with a member of the team. A user creates a timestamp when he views the messages and will be able to post on chat boards that include other residents, attendings, and the nursing staff.

A team will also have the capability of creating a workflow checklist to assist in the collaboration process so everyone is aware of what has been completed and what is left to do. This can be something as ordering labs or as complex as talking to the hospital management to figuring out where to place a patient once they are discharged from the hospital.

This addresses a daily problem that I notice in the hospitals during my rounding where members of the team may not be on the same page of what to expect on managing patients. It can be difficult to keep colleagues aware of changes that occur throughout the day when you are responsible for over 20 patients and tasks can be occasionally overlooked just because of the workloads. There are not enough hours in the day to constantly check in with nurses, keep on top of the labs, consultations, and have time to complete patient notes and discharge requests. I can say without a doubt that I am often frustrated because an order I had put in 5 hours ago had not yet been addressed just because the team member responsible for this task was not aware of the message.  

Patients will be able to be managed quicker because there will not be the lag time of waiting for a consult that was never confirmed, or finalizing the last lab reports without blood being drawn. These small mistakes can accumulate into hospitals going over budget and potential iatrogenic infections because the patients are held longer than necessary.

The most welcoming fact about this messaging apparatus is that it is HIPAA-compliant. Medical professionals are always put in an awkward position because they are trying their best to manage patients but face the ever-present possibility of violating patient confidentiality. Casual conversations in the elevator, stories with colleagues about difficult patients, or an accidental forgotten print-out of labs left on the nurses table after rounding are some of the easiest ways to violate HIPAA.

The best to hope for is a reprimand from the hospital bureaucrats but this can snowball into a lawsuit from a patient depending on the magnitude of the accident. Having a platform that can keep all this information confidential but at the same time promote conversation between management staff can lead to more efficient management and doctors can focus on practicing medicine rather than bureaucratic headaches.