Many industries have been depending on project management tools like Trello, Jira and Slack for years. And yet, email still reigns supreme as the defacto communication tool for healthcare because of HIPAA. Enter: Dr. Michael Docktor, a practicing gastroenterologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Keather Roemhildt, a user experience designer from Silicon Valley. After experiencing a typical afternoon in Docktor’s department (yes, Docktor is his real last name) the two began designing solutions that would make things better. This led to the creation of Dock Health, a mobile task management and collaboration tool for medical teams. One that’s easy-to-use and, of course, HIPAA-compliant!
Conquering the Scourge of Email
Docktor says email is actually where a lot of the administrative work of healthcare gets buried – the work that happens before andafter every clinical encounter. “We’re trying to take the best of what other industries have already discovered, and applying it to healthcare,” said Docktor. “We’re trying to make that easier to securely store and delegate those responsibilities when possible, and create structure so that if there’s a typical set of actions that need to occur (like a protocol), people can do that in a highly reliable fashion.”
Dock Health is going after the “Quadruple Aim,” with the goal of improving the work life of healthcare providers and their teams.
From Triple to Quadruple Aim: Care of the Patient Requires Care of the Provider. Ann Fam Med. December 2014.
Yes, There’s an App for That
Now for the good news, there is now an app for that, and it’s called Dock Health. Fresh out of beta testing at Boston Children’s Hospital, it’s currently available the App Store – or you can experience it on the web at app.dock.health. Once you download the app, you have the option to create an acco
unt and sign up for a demo of the technology — don’t worry, it’s easy to do. Then, if you decide to go sign up for a truly HIPAA-compliant solution, Boston Children’s can get you a business associate agreement (BAA) to make that happen. Docktor explains, “We want our app to be super slick and consumer-like, but we also want to make sure people know what they’re getting into, and how we take their patient data security seriously.” After all, keeping patients’ healthcare data safe and secure is something the team takes very seriously.
Help for Managing Your Practice
One of the great things about Dock Health is that while it is the product of a large academic environment, it’s also been tested at medical practices large and small. And the team has found that these practices have needs that go beyond managing the daily tasks of clinical care. They need help managing their practices, and email integration has been a huge part of that.
“We’ve learned a lot about helping practices get stuff done, and helping them move away from email makes collaboration possible,” said Docktor.
Why .Health?
Our team at .health is of course incredibly excited to see this platform created for doctors by doctors on a .health domain. But for Docktor and his team, having a domain name that represents their core offering is incredibly helpful.
“Dock on its own is a fairly ambiguous name, and the .health gives folks clarity on exactly what we’re trying to do,” said Docktor. “It sounds good, it resonates with people, and it’s been great for us.”
A Force for Good
One thing the Dock Health team wants you to know is that they are not a bunch of technologists building a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
“We are clinicians and innovators at Boston Children’s Hospital trying to solve some of the problems that we see in healthcare,” explains Docktor. “And we’re taking a different approach – we’re trying to be respectful and mindful of HIPAA and while at the same time trying to build a really elegant design that people are going to want to use.”
Ready to empower your team with tools to help them work more productively and collaboratively? Visit Dock.Health for more information, and download the app today!