Success Story: A platform for hospitals to communicate and manage workflow
Forward is a secure messaging tool for healthcare teams to manage patient information and communicate amongst themselves. Founder Dr Barney is interacting with potential collaborators in Dhaka and Mumbai to set up hospital trials.
Founder and co-CEO
Forward Clinical
London, United Kingdom
Impact areas: Big Data & Analytics;
Administration, Compliance & Workflow
Roles: Commercialisation, Fundraising
Stage: Early Launch
Our innovation journey: We are a clinical messaging platform built for healthcare teams. Our secure mobile messaging tool is as easy to use as WhatsApp, but gives health professionals the additional features they need to manage their patients and communication. For example, the ‘Directory’ feature allows users to instantly contact someone they need in the hospital, ‘Tasks’ allows clinical teams to allocate and monitor tasks according to urgency and ‘List’ allows clinical teams to keep up-to-date with patients under their care.
Clinical teams waste time and energy communicating inefficiently. It’s easy to find the right on-call specialist and manage workflow, and patient care becomes more efficient. We seek to give doctors, nurses and clinical staff over an hour of their time back every day (based on our survey across 60 NHS trusts). With Forward, hospital staff will be able to stop relying on WhatsApp, pagers and printed-paper lists, allowing healthcare professionals to devote themselves to their patients again and also build a better work-life balance. Such dramatic improvements can happen when the entire staff of a hospital begins to use Forward to communicate.
As a founder and co-CEO, I work with every member of the team to ensure our efforts have the greatest impact for our users. It is important for us to partner with brilliant organisations and companies, and pursue the right opportunities given our (limited) resources! Our immediate goal is to connect five major UK hospitals. Our long-term goal is to connect the world’s healthcare professionals and permanently change the way they communicate — for everyone’s benefit.
Our HealthCode journey: It’s been brilliant to chat with other innovators active in both, the communications and data analytics fields. I have already spoken to HCo members in Dhaka and Mumbai. Together, we are working hard to deepen our understanding of the global problem in healthcare communication — so much shared learning! Our vision is massive but the struggle is real! We would love to hear from anyone who can help with their expertise in navigating NHS procurement and/or scaling in the NHS and structuring clinical data. We are also looking for partners who can help set up trials of our platform in hospitals or healthcare organisations outside the UK.
Connect @ HealthCode.io: Interested in Barney’s work? Initiate a conversation on the HealthCode.io app!
