Parents of newborns in a neonatal intensive care unit can't spend every minute at the hospital – but at the same time they want to know what's happening. At the Children's Hospital of Orange County (Calif.), NICU clinicians solved this problem by adapting a mobile platform that enables them to send notices to parents, or even chat or text with them.

"It's a great way of communicating with them when they need it most," William Feaster. MD, the Los Angeles area hospital's chief medical information officer, said of the pingmd platform, which CHOC adopted about a year ago.

Just as important, Feaster said, is the fact that the clinicians adapted the app for their own use. "It's a great little project that just sprang up," he said. "Everyone's figuring out their own use cases."

[See also: Spotlight on: Mobile care coordination platforms]

The patient engagement tool is one of the most recent additions to pingmd's platform. Gopal Chopra, CEO of the New York-based company, said the upgraded platform – pingmd 2 – allows doctors to tailor and build specific patient interface programs, bringing them into the real-time conversation with other care providers. Other additions to the platform include the ability to build team referral networks and create referral directors, and integration with an EHR platform (six are integrated so far, with more soon to follow).

The pingmd platform is designed to "establish an efficient and structured dialogue" via a secure app, officials said. This enables clinicians to share photographs, images and texts, and even allows patients to submit information to their doctors. Real-time care coordination is often cited as one of the critical components of value-based care, offering the ability to speed up the care delivery process, reduce delays and waste and improve both patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes.

Feaster said the hospital connected with pingmd roughly one year ago to answer what he called "the texting problem" – that all-too-popular scenario where doctors and nurses were using non-HIPAA-compliant communications solutions to talk to each other. And while he could have ordered all hospital employees to stop texting each other or even turn in their mobile devices at the door, he realized that clinicians need some secure means of communicating with each other in real time.

"It's an essential tool to communicating about care," he said. "This is about so much more than just sending a text."

Pingmd is one of several mHealth companies marketing a cloud-based communications platform to providers and hyping the ability for a clinician to talk instantly with clinicians, care team members and patients. Chopra said the company's goal is to sit above the disparate platforms of the healthcare setting, including health information exchanges and EHRs, and connect data sources that clinicians want most – and immediately.

Feaster said he likes what he's seen of the pingmd platform, so much so that the hospital – a Stage 7 HIMSS EMR Adoption Model honoree this year – has extended its partnership agreement for another three years. And while he expects clinicians to come up with more innovative uses of the platform, he has his ideas as well, including a project targeting adolescents, who are more apt to respond to text messages and apps than phone calls or face-to-face chats with doctors.

"They'd be all over this," he said. "We could gamify it."

Chopra says the platform's integration with EHRs is particularly important going forward, as health systems look for ways to improve access to the medical record and give clinicians decision support tools at the point of care. This may include video chats and wearable devices.

"They still need some work," he said. "But there is a use for them, and we have some ideas."

So will the clinicians at CHOC, most likely.

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