Critical Communications
Critical Communications was created to help professionals do their job as easily, safely and effectively as possible.
In 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic placed their hospitals under huge strain a group of experienced NHS doctors on the front line living through the crisis every day saw the need for a better way for healthcare professionals to do their jobs. A better way to communicate and manage tasks. A better way to save lives.
They came together with a team of UK software engineers and technology industry veterans from Silicon Valley to form Critical Communications and develop its signature product, the Call-4-Help app.
The project started in the heat of the first wave of COVID-19 when three companies from the UK and the US -- Kulestar, 4 Roads and Concept Softworks -- volunteered their time and had up to 40 developers working round the clock at no cost to get the first prototype of the app finished in a week.
Call-4-Help app
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic large numbers of non-ICU specialist health care workers have been very rapidly retrained to work in intensive care units around the world.
Communication is a bottleneck, especially when you’re in PPE with patients and can’t enter and leave infected hot areas. People frequently need help within their hospital teams: getting the right equipment to where it’s needed, finding the right person to call in, or often just getting questions answered.
Until now that’s often been done with large WhatsApp groups, which can be chaotic, inefficient and potentially unsafe.
Call-4-Help improves communications between healthcare professionals within hospitals, making treatment quicker and more efficient. Crucially it also helps to stop the waste of precious PPE by reducing the number of transitions staff have to make in and out of hot areas.
A better way for healthcare professionals to communicate with each other and manage their work saves lives.
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks to GoDaddy who donated towards the cost of the domain, to Digitalocean for providing the hosting free of charge and to Innovate-UK for supporting the project.
