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Victorian startup Medtasker aims to streamline communication and task management for hospital staff

By Administrator | 3 July 2018

Many a TV show set in a hospital is far-fetched, but there’s at least one aspect that is somewhat true to life: hospital staff relying on pagers as one of their key modes of communication.

Thinking there had to be a better, more 2018 way to run a hospital, Dr Andrew Yap and Bernard Duchesne cofounded Medtasker, which aims to update and streamline communication and task management for hospital staff.

The idea came to Dr Yap after he received a pager message while on shift one night that simply read: “Hi Andrew, just letting you know bed 23’s blood pressure is low. Johnny.”

“The problem is, I didn’t know who the patient was (there was no name of the patient), where in the hospital they were (there’s about 15 bed 23s in the hospital), when they needed to be seen (because blood pressure for a 19 year old female is different to a 90 year old man) and how to get further information (there was no call back number),” Dr Yap explained.

“I was dealing with a sick patient and I didn’t have the information to even find the patient in the hospital, let alone prioritise the job. The patient ended up going to ICU with a severe chest infection. I was pretty distraught afterwards because there was something I may have been able to do to have prevented her deterioration.”

As he reflected, Dr Yap sought to come up with a solution to the problem, a journey which even saw him spend six months working in his hospital’s IT department. Read more

Gina Baldassare - Startup Daily - 28 June 2018

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