MediTweet is an open messaging system for clinical environments. It connects Clinical Information Systems (CIS) with both medical devices and personnel. With MediTweet the users are enabled to send structured messages to other users in order to automate documentation and task synchronization. Additionally, users are automatically informed about medical results of patients by medical devices.
Beginning
In the winter semester 2013, students at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) took part in a lecture called “Trends and Concepts in the Software Industry II Next Generation Clinical Information Systems” (TaC) at the chair of Prof. Hasso Plattner. This lecture takes advantage of design thinking principles and methods in order to solve problems occurring in daily business activities. In this particular semester, the task was to improve the workflow of clinical personnel. After several cycles of interviewing, brainstorming, prototyping, and testing, one team developed the concept of a messaging system for clinical environments, called MediTweet.
Development
During the summer semester 2014, a working prototype of MediTweet was implemented in the TaC followup course “Trends and Concepts II Exercise”. The students split up into three teams realising a mobile client for iOS, a messaging server, and a connector for the SAP ISH and i.s.h.med system. Semistructured messages containing event and context information from clinical devices, IT systems, sensors as well as users are broadcasted automatically in predefined streams within the MediTweet network. Having an intuitive mobile UI, users can subscribe and unsubscribe to streams that are relevant for them. So far, it fully integrates into all clinical processes processed within the SAP ISH and i.s.h.med system. Furthermore, MediTweet allows the clinical staff to create tasks (actions) based on received messages. These tasks and their status is synchronised between all recipients of the message stream, making it easy to coordinate their work and improving the clinical information flow.
