System C’s CareFlow Connect app has been rolled out to clinicians at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust to help link up care teams and reduce the organisation’s reliance on paper.

CareFlow Connect has been pushed to some 1,050 clinicians across all nine of the trust’s sites, following a pilot stage that ran in 2017.

Dr Jon Shaw, System C’s director of clinical strategy and design, said it was “very gratifying to see this level and speed of take-up”.

The platform allows clinicians to manage patient care from a mobile device, share tasks and medical information with other care teams and exchange instant messages, WhatsApp-style.

Care teams at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust (UH Bristol) have been using CareFlow Connect to remove paper from handover processes as well as to identify patients in need of more urgent care, or those who are from outside the area.

Chris Bourdeaux, consultant anaesthetist and chief clinical information officer (CCIO) at UH Bristol, said: “The ability to self-organise and communicate as a team wherever you are, using your own phone, and to know when information has been received and read – these are powerful benefits for clinicians and care professionals.

“We are all delighted to reduce reliance on pagers and email, with all the inefficiencies they have involved.”

Bourdeaux suggested the clinical teams had also discovered more novel uses of the app, such as using it to collaborate with other paediatric cardiology teams in South West England and improving patient recruitment into research studies.

“We continue to be surprised by the wealth of benefits and uses our colleagues are finding for the app,” he said. “It really has been revolutionary.”

CareFlow Connect is integrated with UH Bristol’s existing clinical systems, with clinical conversations generated by the app automatically uploaded into the patient’s electronic health record.

Dr Shaw said: “The key focus for us in developing CareFlow has been clinical usability and creating something which is genuinely useful for clinicians and helps with patient care.”