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Frequently Asked Questions

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Frequently Asked Questions

How does BuddyCare help my clinic? Why would I start to use it?

The BuddyCare platform helps your clinic with automated patient education, questionnaire/form collection, and patient progress tracking and monitoring.

  • The BuddyCare App allows healthcare professionals to provide their patients with the right information at the right time. The App informs and empowers patients about the next steps in their care and engages them through interactive push notifications.

  • With the platform, healthcare professionals have real-time visibility of patients’ activities through an interactive dashboard. The Dashboard tracks and generates reports from patient data and patient outcomes (PROMs) and experience questionnaires (PREMs).


The BuddyCare Patient Management Platform significantly reduces administrative work, patient no-shows, cancellations and can aid in diminishing associated costs.

What challenges is the BuddyCare care coordination software solving? How is this helping my clinic?

Buddy Healthcare's care coordination platform can support your surgery or other medical specialty clinics in many ways, such as:

 

  • Automating patient communication and care coordination through automated patient education and reminders;

  • Reducing care personnel’s administrative workload, such as phone calls and paperwork;

  • Improving identification of late cancellations and no-shows;

  • Enabling faster scheduling and preparation of replacement patients;

  • Automating patient questionnaire and data collection such as electronic pre-operative assessments or patient-reported outcomes and experiences;

  • Enabling remote patient monitoring and enhancing recovery after surgery (ERAS);

  • Providing reports of the collected patient data to hospital management.
How much does the BuddyCare Platform cost?

We can quickly provide you with a quote, once we have had a first online discussion.


In order to be able to provide you with the most accurate pricing, we would need to know the following: 

  • What kind of care pathways are you planning on implementing;

  • How big is your clinic and what is the current patient flow;

  • How many different language versions would you like to have etc. 

You can book a free online demo with us here.

Can hospital management teams benefit from implementing the BuddyCare platform?

Management staff in hospitals where the BuddyCare platform has been introduced have reported positive experiences in terms of economic impact, staff management, and patient care.

The list of benefits highlighted by management teams includes:

  • Reductions of administrative workloads due to the lowered need for phone calls which are largely replaced by the in-app messaging service and the platform’s automated collection of patient questionnaires and forms;

  • Cost reduction arising from the lowered administrative burden and the improved ability to identify no-shows and cancellations earlier, and ability to reschedule and prepare new patients for procedures, which have been cancelled at short notice;

  • Consistency across the entire care pathway is improved and upheld by the use of the app to both communicate with patients and store data – this, in turn, allows management to evaluate patient-reported outcomes and experiences through a consistent channel of information;

  • The platform allows management teams to optimize resource planning and allocation and paves the way for further automation of processes going forward;

  • The platform collects structured data of patients’ care pathways and provides reports to hospital management for analyzing care pathways and patient feedback;

  • Marketing your hospital. Hospitals can make their services more attractive to their patients by improving digital patient services and offering a better experiences. 

What are the current available languages of the platform?

BuddyCare Platform is available in multiple languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian) Spanish and Swedish.

If you need additional languages, just contact us and let’s discuss the implementation.

I’m not sure we have time to start using your product right now?

This is the reason why you should start using the BuddyCare Platform. In many medical specialties, the number of patients is growing while care teams are short-staffed.


The platform is easy-to-use and we will make sure that getting started goes smoothly and quickly for both your care team and your patients. It’s part of our package!

Our platform can help you by:

  • Automating your patients’ education and reminding process;

  • Automating forms/questionnaires collection;

  • Enabling improved no-show/cancellation identification and faster preparation of replacement patients;

  • Faster scheduling and preparation of replacement patients;

  • Enabling patient data collection and reporting, which helps you better analyze redundancy in patient care pathways;

  • Identifying your patients' care progress easily.

  • Providing existing care protocols that we can edit and customize to suit your use case ---> We already have more than 200 different care protocols that will support the deployment stage and ease the process for your development team.



Long term, we will help you to reduce your administrative burden and costs. Our hospital customers have, for example, been able to reduce up to 98% of pre-operative phone calls, up to 50% no-shows and cancellations and up to 20% of unnecessary post-operative visits. In most cases, they were also able to save more than one hour spent per patient preoperatively. 

How do I get started with BuddyCare?

We will support and guide you in the care pathway creation process. Our hospital clients and clinics provide us with the care pathway content and our customer success team then manages the technical implementation of the new digital pathway. You don’t need to worry about it.

After your care pathway has been created, our team will assist you with setting up the patient communication process and will train your team step by step. 

 

Your patients:

  • Patients download the BuddyCare App or your hospital named white-label App from Google Play Store or App Store and use either an activation code provided by a hospital or sign up by using secure authentication. 

Your care team:

  • Your clinic’s care personnel use a remote patient monitoring dashboard and our customer success team trains your care team on the successful use of the Dashboard and supports them along the way. 

The platform is easy-to-use and we will make sure that getting started goes smoothly for both your care team and your patients. It’s part of our package!  

Does the BuddyCare Platform support my medical specialty?

Buddy Healthcare initially started producing intelligent and automated surgical care pathways, but it has rapidly expanded to other medical specialities.

The Platform is fully modular and can be used for different use cases, from operative care to chronic care and psychiatry. At the moment, the platform is in use in 25 different medical specialities.

Below you can see where the BuddyCare Platform is being used:

Operative care:

  • Orthopaedics, joint replacement
  • ENT surgeries
  • Gastrointestinal surgeries, obesity
  • Plastic surgeries
  • Pediatric surgeries
  • Eye surgeries
  • Dental surgeries
  • Vascular surgeries
  • Urology surgeries
  • Hand Surgeries

Internal medicine and other specialities:

  • Internal medicine and chronic care
  • Gastroenterology
  • Cardiology
  • Women's and obstructive diseases
  • Physiatry, Chronic pain
  • Endocrinology
  • Physiotherapy
  • Paediatrics
  • Cancer Care
  • Respiratory diseases
  • Infection diseases


Mental health and general:

  • Psychiatry
  • Children psychiatry
  • Radiology

Other expertise:

  • Health screenings
  • Preoperative assessment


 


What can be shared with patients through the App?

Some examples of what can be shared through push notifications:

  • Information about the surgery
  • Administrative forms, such as pre-operative assessments
  • Procedure checklists
  • Educational videos or photos
  • When to take/stop medications
  • Wound care information
  • Rehabilitation exercises
  • Pain meters
  • In-app questionnaires (PROMs, PREMs, QoL)
  • Patients can contact care teams through a two-way secure messaging feature and, for example, send photos of their surgical wounds or important PDF documents
What are the most important features for patients?
  • Timely automated reminders and push notifications ensure that your patients get the right information at the right time and will be properly prepared;

  • Patients can read and submit care-related education, tasks and questionnaires at their own pace in the BuddyCare App;

  • All care-related information, including details on how to contact the clinic, are in one location and available 24/7;

  • Patients can contact care teams through a two-way secure messaging feature and, for example, send photos of their surgical wounds or receive important PDF documents.

  • Someone can act on behalf of the patient by also downloading the App. This feature is useful, for example, when the patient is a child or an elderly person.
What are the most important features for the care personnel?
  • The BuddyCare Platform automates the personnel’s care coordination process as the patient-facing mobile app instructs patients with timely information, appointment, and task reminders and collects in-app questionnaires;

  • The BuddyCare Platform automates pre-and post-surgical or other kinds of care pathway care coordination and patient communication → fewer phone calls, less paperwork for your care team

  • The platform improves early identification of potential patient no-shows and cancellations → cost and time savings. Additionally, in case of cancellation or no-shows, the platform enables more efficient  preparation and scheduling of replacement patients;

 

 

  • The remote patient monitoring capability offered through the platform affords care teams an at-a-glance overview of all patient care pathways and activities in real-time, including key data showing the patient’s degree of compliance with the care protocol.
Is there a way to receive notifications when the patient acknowledges the education module, submits a questionnaire, or does not complete an important task or form?

Yes. all patient actions are tracked and logged (date and time) and those are visible in the dashboard. The dashboard also shows when the patient has last been active/online in the App.

The remote patient monitoring dashboard provides an at-a-glance overview of patients' activities and care progress.

During the deployment phase, we identify, together with the care team, which deviations are going to trigger attention notifications in the Dashboard.

  • Then, if patients are progressing normally in the care path the platform shows a green “all good” status next to the patient name;

  • But, if there is a patient having difficulties or showing declining engagement in his/her care pathway, the dashboard shows a red “attention” notification.


The dashboard supports care personnel in identifying patients' eligibility for surgery and helps to detect potential no-shows and cancellations.

Can I customize my clinic's care pathways?

Yes, of course! The platform enables providers to configure their own automation rules, features and timers to customize the best possible automated care coordination process. Our customer success team helps you along the way and manages the technical components in designing your pathway.

What I can do with BuddyCare? What else can I get using BuddyCare?

With the BuddyCare Platform you can:

  • Digitize and automate your care protocols;

  • Collect forms and questionnaires such as pre-operative assessments and electronic patient-reported outcome and experience measures;

  • You can generate reports from patient data to support your analyses;

  • You can conduct clinical studies.
Does the BuddyCare Platform support long-term tracking of Patient-Reported Outcomes?

Yes, any PROMs can be collected through the app and their results calculated.

We already have digitized more than 30 patient-reported outcome and experience measure questionnaires. You can see them here.  

Additional questionnaires can easily be added and you can decide with which frequency and for how long questionnaires will be collected.

Read more about electronic PROMs and PREMs collection from here.

PS. We have also written a blog on how to automate the collection of Patient-reported experiences (PREMs). 

Does the BuddyCare App work on both Android and iOS platforms?

Yes, both platforms are supported.

How about GDPR? Is the Platform regulated?
  • Our data storage provider is GDPR and HIPAA compliant

  • The BuddyCare software has the medical device class I CE mark.

  • Buddy Healthcare’s Quality Management System is ISO 13485:2016 audited and certified.