The Challenge

The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne’s global standing in paediatric care has seen its Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) adopted by medical facilities and clinicians worldwide.

The Hospital’s original CPGs were designed for internal use and only available on its website. In time, Victorian, Queensland and NSW paediatric hospitals and clinicians adopted the guidelines. Today, 60,000 users worldwide, including in the USA, UK and Asia, rely on the child-specific practice information.

As background, Dr Kate Harding, Paediatrician & Clinical Practice Guideline Consultant, Department of General Medicine, The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, says: “Clinicians are working in a vast range of conditions, and sometimes in difficult settings with limited access to certain expertise. With lives dependent on accurate treatment and clinicians relying on the CPGs, we had to ensure they had the latest information at their fingertips.

“An app was to be an ‘on the go’ repository of proven best practice, available for whenever clinicians have questions regarding the treatment of young ones – diagnostics, treatments, dosages.

RCH’s original app was fed information, manually, from the Hospital’s website. It was designed to simplify complex data into visual answers – in the form of tables and flow charts – for clinicians working in the wards.

By 2021, the app’s technology platform wasn’t user friendly, its search function was poor and updates were difficult to do. Much of the information did not translate from web to mobile without losing data. And it was no longer being supported.

The frustrations were that: “We’re not software developers. We really needed someone who could bring our specific medical goals to life – who could comprehend our situation and talk to us in a way we’d understand,” Kate says.

The RCH had spent 18 months working with a developer but failed to build a satisfactory replacement app. Then Compnow and a Zutak solution was recommended to the team.

The Solution

Associate Professor Mike Starr leads the CPG team. Mike is a Paediatrician, Infectious Diseases Physician, Consultant in Emergency Medicine at RCH and Honorary Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne. He says: “From our first meeting, Compnow got it. They listened to every one of our concerns and addressed them. Plus they suggested helpful things, came up with excellent additional features we hadn’t thought of – like how to improve the platform’s operation and its presentation to clinicians.”

Having introduced Zutak as the basis of the app’s content management and publication, Compnow divided the RCH project into two phases. The first to create the essential, base platform for rapid deployment and the second to add the ‘wish list’ features.

“My focus was usability and distilling complex information into easy to assimilate content in form of graphs and flow charts. Compnow considered the project from end to end – they accommodated the governance and communications needs of our hospital and were very deliberate in the formulation of disclaimers and IP protections – all while keeping sight of delivery,” Mike says.

Compnow’s engineers designed the mobile app and the new cloud-based environment around the unique nature of the RCH website. Zutak auto scans the website and updates the app with new information – no longer does someone have to manually take the data across.

When users launch the app using an internet connection, the data is updated. With all content inside the app, it is available for offline viewing. And Zutak’s push notifications also alert CPG users to new content.

“The advantage is clinicians don’t need to be connected to the internet to search the guidelines. That’s important as not everybody around the world has access to great connections, at all times,” Kate says.

Bespoke features added to the design include an engine that holds existing and newly created content. It is screened for HTML and stored in the Compnow cloud. And an account login for users allows the creation of favourites and access to multiple devices.

The Benefits

Kate says: “Compnow grasped the concepts very quickly and were always on point. They were stimulated by our app’s challenges and knew they had to get it right, to fix it in a smart way. They workshopped ideas and came back to us with creative solutions – nuanced for our clinical setting.
I was very impressed.

“All the things we struggled with in the old app are gone. The Zutak platform has brought our critical care guidelines to life with easy to see and use charts and tables for clinicians on the go.

“For us as non IT people, Zutak is easy to manage. We can create new interfaces and content without any help. When we make a crucial change – such as to a medication dose or a particular test that impacts patient care – it automatically updates from the website and is replicated in the app”, she says.

Mike says: “The design and usability that came directly from Compnow are fantastic. The app is so smooth now, its honed to what we need. I’ve recently been teaching doctors and nurses in Fiji, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and a few other countries in the Asia Pacific; a lot of them use the app all the time. So we know it also fills the needs of our overseas users.

“Compnow people are proactive communicators and have the unusual skill combination of being developers and having business sense. Everything is clear with issues, meeting agendas, what’s been discussed and how resolved. They kept the project on target and it came in ahead of schedule,” he says.

18 months on from the completion of the project, collaboration between the RCH and Compnow continues to improve the useability of the app. The addition of feedback interfaces ensures the flow of ideas, content accuracy
and capturing the buzz on a particular guideline topic. RCH can now identify groups and push targeted information or surveys for expert responses.

Rosie Forster, Manager​ - Clinical Practice Guidelines, Department of General Medicine at the Hospital says Compnow brings expertise and service beyond expectations: “At new year there was an issue with the app. While everyone else is shut down then, hospitals tend to be very busy and the app is particularly vital to the junior clinicians who cover for consultants over that time. I sent an email to Compnow and people jumped in from their holidays to help – because of who they are and because they really understand us as a hospital.

“And Compnow’s support goes beyond the technical. They’re helping us with connections to communications experts to promote the uptake of the app.

“With the previous attempt at an app, we had the difficult job of reporting to the board of the RCH Foundation that had funded our idea, that it wasn’t working. With Compnow, those reports are all glowing now,” she says.