The Careful platform was developed to enable visibility, accountability, and collaboration as patients move through different care settings and interact with different caregivers. The platform provides hospitals, clinicians, and multidisciplinary teams with a constantly updated, holistic view of every patient’s plan of care to ensure their safe and frictionless movement throughout their health journey, the company noted.
DJ Hamblin-Brown, MD, founder, and CEO at Careful, said the app is simple to use, easy to implement, and helps hospitals communicate internally as well as with patients and their families. He said he was motivated to build Careful after his mother nearly died from a simple communication failure in a UK hospital.
“Handover is a time-consuming and dangerous process, especially in critical care,” said Johann Grunlingh, MD, an NHS emergency medicine consultant and intensive care specialist in London. He and his team at Newham Hospital helped to test the new app during development. “Careful fills a huge gap where electronic patient record systems perform poorly. Careful provides an action-focus that would benefit every care team in the NHS.”
The Careful platform works on mobile, tablet, or desktop presenting critical information for each patient, along with task lists assigned to individuals, clarifying who needs to do what, and when. As staff change shift and patients move through the hospital, tasks and status information move with them – even out into the community or home. As a result, patients and staff know at all times what is happening, and who is responsible.
Careful users can send, receive, and share responsibility for patient care during peer-to-peer handover, internal referrals, patient discharges, and transfers between organizations. Patient information is added, reviewed, and updated at every transition of care. Caregivers contribute to the story as the patient moves between community care, hospital, teams, and home or back into community care. Patients are invited to access and contribute to their own records.
The company noted that the platform uses privacy-by-design principles and is regulatorily compliant in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. The cloud-based application is fully encrypted and protected, Careful said. It is also fully interoperable using industry-standard messaging – so that it can integrate with healthcare systems globally.
