Henry Ford Health System and VisionIT have partnered to offer CareTrail, a mobile application, to improve communication between clinicians. The platform provides clinicians with a tool that offers on-call scheduling, availability updates and additional workflow optimizations.

CareTrail combines aspects of social media to build a patient-centered secure mobile application. The platform, being compatible with many electronic health records (EHRs), is meant to build upon collaboration between clinicians for improving patient care.

"It's more important than ever for a patient's care team to have a truly mobile communication tool that's completely secure and protects our patients' privacy," said Bruce Muma, MD, chief medical officer for the Henry Ford Physician Network. "As a caregiver, I'm truly excited that we finally have the ability to capitalize on the advantages of mobile technology to focus care in a more individualized and efficient way."

CareTrail uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud operating platform to offer a secure avenue for sharing information. The platform also offers on-call scheduling to check which clinicians are available, an external invitation feature to securely invite outside clinicians to a patients’ care team and a section for clinicians to post care instructions for individual patients.

"Our belief is that patient-centric care requires effective communication by the extended care team dedicated to that patient and we built CareTrail in support of that premise," said Paul Toenjes, senior vice president of VisionIT. "We are very pleased with the CareTrail product being launched and believe that our approach to collaboration provides us with a very differentiated offering in this space because of the extensions beyond simple messaging. We have plans to extend those capabilities to also address population health, patient monitoring and patient management."