BlackBerry Program

The use of BlackBerrys at the University Health Network (UHN) for administrative functions had been in place for several years. With the necessary infrastructure in place, the opportunity to pilot the use of these devices for clinical communication existed. Collaborating on work to deliver critical alerts by email and accessing evidence-based decisions support from the intranet, a pilot to demonstrate the impact of using BlackBerry devices to coordinate patient care ensued. We saw rapid adoption of this approach by our physicians and the use of BlackBerrys for communication are now a part of standard operations on the General Internal Medicine (GIM) service.

Expanding on this approach, we built processes to enhance nurse-physician communication and Allied Health staff took advantage of the efficiencies seen with email as well. The Emergency Department equipped key staff with BlackBerrys for coordinating activities that would help improve the flow of patients through our hospital system. Additional pockets of work are now progressing and so the use of BlackBerrys to improve clinical communication has now become a program. The purpose is to provide structure around our research and publication activities and to help others develop effective communication processes based on our experience.