Dr Lin Hlaing is a junior doctor who is based at Hampshire Hospitals FT. As part of her junior doctor rotation Dr Lin moved to work in the critical care and emergency department at UHS. Within this rotation Dr Lin was given protected time to work as a digital fellow and collaborate with the informatics team. Dr Lin’s area of focus was to look at how to improve areas of digital technology in use at the Trust.

Dr Lin worked with the Medxnote project team which supports communications and the management of tasks between clinical teams. The messaging system was put in place to replace the inefficient and old-fashioned bleep system. Medxnote was used a stand alone app on mobile phones when it was first introduced.

During the COIVD-19 pandemic the Trust introduced Microsoft Teams as a new way of working and saw the need to incorporate Medxnote to sit within MS Teams.

Medxnote lets clinicians view and be alerted to information from the Electronic Patient Record. For example, clinical teams can receive their patient results as soon as they are published (radiology and pathology), receive internal referrals from other teams, view the latest observations chart for their patient and find an inpatient’s location in the hospital. Dr Lin has helped to develop this project by contributing ideas and testing the messaging app.

“I enjoyed FPT training in clinical informatics so much, as my lifelong passion is leadership and doing these projects with clinicians, technicians and working as a team to improve my leadership skills. I attended monthly digital steering group meetings and it was always exciting to see progress and reaching our goals. Moreover, I also love my creative work designing ward round templates and proformas. I would highly recommend the FPT clinical informatics experience to my colleagues as it is a great experience to see how digital technologies are helping and making our clinicians lives easier, working with IT technicians and others, being part of a team for leadership and management experience.”

Helen Harrison principal project manger agrees the time with Dr Lin was helpful to further develop the application,

“Having Dr Lin’s insight into how junior doctors work and what information they need has been invaluable to the project. It has allowed us to continue to develop the use of Medxnote by making changes that really benefit the system users. She has also been able to spread the word about Medxnote amongst her peers and colleagues to make Medxnote a system which many UHS staff now rely on.”

CCIO Mike Celinski, consultant anaesthetist worked with Dr Lin during her flexible portfolio training and emphasises the importance of giving protected time to staff to further rollout the adoption of digital technology,

“We need to free up some time for clinicians to be able to work with the digital systems we have in place so we get it right. Dr Lin’s involvement as digital fellow while on rotation with us, as someone who was new to the Trust and part of the ICS, was invaluable for us to improve how we work together – from jr doctors on rotation to consultants who have worked for the Trust the length of their career – as digital technology races ahead we need to keep up and make our systems work for all staff.”