At Northern Health, Medtasker went live for inpatient routine clinical communication almost four years ago, and now the team is taking the next big step and adding the PreMET tasks, rolling out on April 13.

“This is something coming in with high demand and a lot of people are quite excited about this. Staff will be now able to call a PreMET via their desktop, rather than having to call communications, saving valuable time. The staff will be able to call directly, with the right patient information,” explained Megan Farrell, ICT Support for Medtasker.

Elise Sutton, Clinical Deterioration and Resuscitation Coordinator said currently, there are around 3,000 calls to communications via 444 each month, and half of those are PreMETs, so the new system will reduce the workflow on the switchboard.

“Rather than going from clinical to non-clinical and then back to clinical, it will be clinical to clinical communication. It also cuts out that extra human error risk factor,” she added.

When Medtasker first went live, the team received inquiries within the first six months to get PreMETs on MedTasker.

Sandy Ayoub, Medtasker Project Officer explained PreMET calls are called for an urgent medical review.

“If a staff member notices the patient is deteriorating, they will escalate a PreMET call which will activate the treating medical team to come and review the patient within 15 minutes. With Medtasker, if nobody shows up after 15 minutes, the task will be automatically re-escalated, which is another benefit,” she explained.

“PreMETs are so important because proper responding to these call reduces the number of MET calls, which require a separate clinical team. Having PreMETS now on Medtasker will also introduce a more streamlined system people are already familiar with, making thing more efficient for clinical communication,” she added.

Featured image (left to right): Elise Sutton, Lachlan Hayes (back), Sandy Ayoub (front), Megan Farrell.