STC: Tafani, a Verint Community intranet where its people ask, share and put forward ideas
4 Roads built Tafani, STC's intranet on Verint Community: questions and discussions, ideation challenges, surveys and knowledge, on 54 custom widgets.
Call 4 Help: an app built in six weeks to get NHS hospital staff help where it was needed
In 2020, 4 Roads and three other firms put paid work aside to build Call 4 Help in six weeks: an app that sent NHS hospital staff help where it was needed.
It's fantastic to see how quickly the companies involved had developed the iOS and Android app. This will literally save lives.
The brief
Help to the right ward, fast.
In 2020, at the peak of the first wave of COVID-19, NHS staff, especially those outside intensive care, were struggling to share information. That led to the loss of potentially life-saving personal protective equipment (PPE) and a shortage of critical care beds, at a time when both were in short supply.
Communication between hospital staff had long been slow and inefficient: the medical sector was one of the few still using pagers. Nurses and doctors often had to take off their PPE and leave their area to find a colleague who could answer a simple question.
At The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King's Lynn, Dr Peter Young, an anaesthetist and intensive care specialist, asked for an app to help non-specialist staff in critical care units communicate better.
Call 4 Help was built to get teams to the right parts of a hospital, bringing ventilators, masks and medication with them, and to let staff share video and audio, so asking for and sharing information is simple. Its aim: to save lives, and to save valuable PPE.
- Client: NHS
- First hospital: The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King's Lynn
- Built by: 4 Roads, Kulestar, Concept Softworks and CK Alpha
- Platforms: iOS and Android
- Timeframe: six weeks
The app
Ask, claim, go.
A member of staff asks for what they need: advice from the duty doctor, medicines that have not arrived, help proning a patient (turning them onto their front). Each request says where, down to the block, ward and bed, and how long it has been waiting.
Colleagues see every waiting request and claim the one they can answer, and each person sees their own requests and the ones they are responding to.
Senior doctors and nurses monitor and assign the tasks through the app, which was built with PPE in mind.
The build
Paid work put aside, and an app in six weeks.
4 Roads, Kulestar, Concept Softworks and CK Alpha dropped all paid work and joined as one team of developers. Kept apart by social distancing, 4 Roads' developers worked around the clock, and the iOS and Android app was built in six weeks.
Call 4 Help was rolled out first at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King's Lynn, with a view to every NHS hospital in the country and to hospitals around the world.
Have a project like this in mind?
Tell us what your customers are trying to do, and we will start from there.
Speak to Rob (we can't promise he won't be on his bike)
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