Hamilton doctors, nurses using secure messaging to improve patient care

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Published July 26, 2022 at 4:50 pm

Doctors, nurses and fellow healthcare practitioners at a Hamilton hospital network have started using a text tool to brief each other on patients’ medical histories.

Hamilton Health Sciences (HHS) revealed today that the $175-million Epic digital information system it began using last month, which allows patients to find all their medical records in one place, also includes a secure messaging tool for caregivers. That feature is called Secure Chat and allows healthcare pros to review information, which might save patients from having to repeatedly give it to different people.

“It functions like text messaging or WhatsApp, but it’s a completely secure way of communicating,” Dr. Alim Pardhan, an emergency department doctor who led the first HHS team to use Secure Chat, stated in a media release.

“This way of communicating is a huge step forward from just 10 years ago, when doctors would track down colleagues through paging and wait for them to call back. More recent technology allowed for texting or WhatsApp messaging, but we had to be really careful about what we transmitted because those messaging tools aren’t secure. With Secure Chat, we can securely share information.”

The hospital network notes that an individual patient’s care plan often involves coordination between doctors, nurses and healthcare practitioners. Previously, HHS staff would communicate through a paging system. Sometimes standard texting would be used, but that would involve some very careful wording in order to protect patient confidentiality.

“We could only reach out to doctors and other team members whose cell phone numbers we had,” said Sarah Hayhow, a clinical educator for Hamilton General Hospital’s emergency department and HHS Urgent Care Centre.

“With Secure Chat, we can search any HHS doctor or team member by name and send them a message. We don’t need to know their cell phone number. We can also reach out to resident doctors via the team they’re with.”

The addition of Secure Chat comes while HHS and St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton are beset with “record-high” staffing shortages during the seventh wave of COVID-19. Last week, the hospital networks issued a joint statement saying they have 675 job vacancies, due to current staff who are isolating due to COVID-19, as well as a lack of qualified applicants. Workers in the healthcare field have also been working through a more than two-year global pandemic.

Nurses and other public sector employees have also had annual raises capped at 1 per cent under the Ontario government’s Bill 124 legislation, which passed into law last November. Inflation has since reached a three-decade high in Canada, hitting 8.1 per cent in June.

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