HAIL lab plans to integrate a basic, semi-automatic phone messaging system with several goals to aid Vanderbilt's hospital infrastructure. Although an automated phone call and messaging system exists for informing patients of upcoming appointments, Knock allows care-givers to rapidly create ad-hoc, short-term calls and messages with data retrieval and custom conditional logic. The primary use cases are:
- A patient has arrived at a clinic and needs to be notified of when to advanced to different points of care.
- A patient's medication has changed or has recently had a surgery, and certain vitals need to be tracked regularly out of office and potentially acted upon.
- A care-giver or technician foresees a delay in seeing patients and wants to notify all upcoming patients their clinic is running behind.
- A patient's family needs to know the status of a patient during surgery.
- A patient managing a chronic condition does not have specialized devices to track their vitals.
This messaging system referred to as Knock is a stand-alone web application independent of Vanderbilt's current scheduling confirmation system. Knock simplifies the process of semi-automated patient communication by allowing clinicians to use a web-interface to create basic call flows. Clinicians customize flows to both notify patients and retrieve information through a patient's dial pad. They can set complex repeating contact attempts and Knock can be configured to try back upon patient request or when the phone is busy.
Knock is built upon a phone integration third-party API named Twilio. It is designed to cost pennies per call or text and provides synchronous connections. Using an API rather than a software package allows for software to be developed in any language and eliminates the burden of complicated phone infrastructure.
Knock ties into Clarity to process patient information, such as appointment time and phone number, which gets updated daily. Knock stores patient-entered results internally on a secure server. Yet it can also be set to email, call, or text clinicians when it determines action is immediately required.
Current feature development includes:
- Allowing patients to view and modify the data they've entered through a dial pad on their phone on either a mobile device or computer.
- Allowing care-givers to record messages to say to users rather than computer-generated voices.
- Support for patient time-zones.
Future improvements to Knock over 6 months to 1 year of development include integrating into the scheduler to recommend appointment rescheduling or even reschedule appointments itself.