MELBOURNE – October 18, 2021 – Melbourne-headquartered Microsoft Gold partner FiveP Australia has launched a pioneering new application that solves one of the most common communication challenges for frontline workers across the healthcare industry, leveraging Microsoft Teams as the underlying technology.

Built as an application inside Teams and developed with input from Melbourne-based health service Austin Health – where it is now being utilised – Baret is a role-based messaging solution that enables structured communication across clinical and frontline workers in hospitals and care settings.

The solution solves one of the most common communications challenges relating to patient care in knowing who is available to be contacted for information and assistance and being able to reach them in time-sensitive situations.

According to Nicole Hosking, Operations Director Radiology & MIT, Austin Health; “We have different individuals rotating through the same clinical role within a 24hr period. It can be challenging and time consuming to find the person who is performing the rotational clinical role that you need to speak to at a given time.” She added that it can also be a time-consuming task to handover all existing clinical communications at each shift change, “From my perspective, we now have so many different clinical communication methods available across the health industry that staff may not always be using the same platform as their colleagues. We’re running a pilot project in Radiology at Austin Health to rationalise and streamline how we communicate with each other as a healthcare team.”

The idea to develop a solution that met this challenge had its roots in the rapid deployment of Microsoft Teams at Austin Health in early 2020 in response to COVID and the need for office staff working remotely to collaborate with clinical staff working in and around the COVID wards. Austin Health had commenced exploring ideas around the challenges of role-based communications, and when FiveP started noticing some of the clinical use cases appearing as a result of their Microsoft Teams adoption, they developed a basic prototype to illustrate how it could be done leveraging the full power of communication on Teams.

“Teams is already our embedded corporate communication platform”, said Alan Pritchard, Director, EMR and ICT Services, Austin Health. “Everybody’s using it and we’re already licenced for all users. The idea that we could solve another business problem with this same technology that we already have was very appealing.” He added, “After being embedded with us for a year and a half, FiveP completely understood the problem, because they’d lived and breathed the Modern Workplace transition throughout the hospital and got to know a lot of people through that process. When they came to us and said, ‘We think we can solve this problem. Would you like to work on this with us?’, the obvious answer for me was ‘Yes’.”

FiveP’s experience in developing solutions on the Microsoft Teams platform has enabled the integration of Baret with EMR/PAS patient information systems whilst also keeping the app simple and intuitive for users.

Jane Prowse, GM of Modern Workplace for FiveP and Baret product lead said, “There is presently increased complexity and increased demand in health services, within an environment that incorporates phones, paging systems, email, intranets, multiple specialty clinical software applications and more. What Baret represents is the ability to replace multiple communication methods with a single tool and introduce a far more streamlined approach to clinical communication, whilst elevating what’s possible across communication channels for our healthcare workers and allowing them to focus more on direct patient care.”

Dr Nic Woods, Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft Australia and New Zealand, said, “How we communicate in the workplace has fundamentally changed and this is particularly true of health. Increasing digitisation and a pandemic has influenced new care delivery models, with demand on the health system at an all-time high and an urgent need to effectively communicate across teams. Much of the status quo experience heavily relies on pagers and phone calls. To arm clinical and operational teams with better tools, FiveP has done an excellent job in developing this role-based messaging capability in partnership with Austin Health that facilitates critical information across individuals and teams while leveraging the familiarity and access of Microsoft Teams. I am delighted by this initiative and the impact it is already having in helping clinical teams do their work during incredibly challenging times.”

About Austin Health Austin Health is a Melbourne-based tertiary and quaternary health service and the largest Victorian provider of training for specialist physicians and surgeons.

About FiveP Founded in 2013, FiveP is one of Australia’s leading providers of digital products and consulting services to organisations seeking to transform their ways of working with the Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 platforms. FiveP deliver ‘single pane of glass’ digital workspace solutions that enable and empower everybody to participate in the modern workforce.

About Microsoft Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more.

Contact: Matt Krosch – FiveP Australia [email protected] | 0413 660 957