Could 'Slack For Surgeons' Finally Kill Pagers In The NHS?

In the 1960s a new digital technology revolutionized communication between doctors in hospitals around the world.

Today, some 50 years later, you’d struggle to find a 20-year-old who even knows what a pager is, let alone how they work.

That is, unless they’re a junior doctor in Britain’s National Health Service.

What the *bleep*!

The NHS is still the largest operator of pagers in the world, spending £6.6 million every year on 130,000 ‘bleepers’.

For anyone accustomed to WhatsApp, Snapchat or Slack, the way two doctors communicate via pagers is simply archaic:

First, one doctor has to find a landline phone which are dotted around the hospital, call the switchboard and request the second doctor they want to talk to.

The operator then pages that person with the 4-digit phone extension that the first doctor called from.

If all goes well, the second doctor will track down their own landline phone, and call the number… hopefully, while the first doctor is still waiting by the phone.

“But what happens when I get the bleep while I'm in the middle of doing something?” asks Barney Gilbert, a doctor at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

After one or two minutes the other person has probably gone and by the end of the day I’m left with a long list of 4-digit number with no idea how important those calls were.

In fact, the system is so bad it’s not surprising that nearly every doctor in Britain has quietly stopped using their pager and have switched over to commercial messaging apps instead.

WhatsApp Doc?

“97% of surveyed doctors routinely send sensitive patient information on instant messenger without acquiring patient consent,” a study warned in the British Medical Journal last year.

Consent when using messaging apps is one problem, but the risk to patients’ healthcare data is an even bigger one.

WhatsApp touts its ‘end-to-end encryption’ as being the best in the business, but as the app doesn’t have a PIN code and is typically used for chatting with friends, family and healthcare colleagues, the risk of sharing sensitive medical information in the wrong chat is high.

The healthcare data being shared is a huge problem in itself, confidential medical records like X-Rays, MRI scans, even patients’ paper bedside notes which could easily slip into the public domain.

According to the new GDPR European data law, businesses can be fined up to 4% of annual turnover or €20 million should they fail to protect data properly.

And hospitals should be terrified.

Brighton Hospital was fined £325,000 in 2012 after a worker accidentally sold a hard drive on eBay which contained patient data.

If you think that’s bad, today every single smartphone-wielding surgeon is likely walking around with a pocket full of private medical data, potentially putting hospitals on a collision course for a data disaster.

Slack for surgeons

That’s why in 2016 Dr Barney Gilbert, along with fellow foundation doctor Lydia Yarlott and entrepreneur Philip Mundy, co-founded Forward.

“Slack is a tool that corporates use to get work done, and that's our vision, to bring all the connectivity and integrations that Slack has into healthcare,” says Dr Gilbert.

It’s an app that combines WhatsApp-like messaging with a shared healthcare task manager (for keeping track of patients and priorities) and a connected directory of users within a hospital… so no more calling up the switchboard.

Every user is verified against their NHS email address, data is encrypted, there’s a PIN on the app and, yes, Forward is GDPR compliant and meets both confidentiality and information governance guidelines within the NHS.

Having only just raised $1.3 million in November and expanded the team to eight people in London, Dr Gilbert has already managed to launch pilots across five different public and private healthcare organizations in the UK.

Some 1,500 doctors across the country are now using Forward, with 500 doctors at District General Hospital in Kent leading the way.

“It’s a top-down and bottom-up approach,” says Dr Gilbert. “We’re working with trusts, but also if a junior doctor downloads the app, we’ll help them get started, they can set up a team and within a week they’re hooked.”

Forward charges hospitals per user per month and Dr Gilbert says his pricing is ‘competitive’ versus the pagers he replaces.

It’s believed the NHS could almost half the £6.6 million it spends on pagers by switching to mobile apps like Forward.

So one thing’s for sure, the pagers have to go.