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How I use my iPad Pro as a Doctor

2019-06-26 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 9:05 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Tools, apps and tech, Medicine and his doctor years) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His medical past, Sponsor segment present, He changed his mind

Ali shows four ways he uses his iPad Pro at work as a junior doctor: patient to-do lists in GoodNotes with his Dash Plus and box shade systems, kept within data protection; electronic patient records on ward rounds; looking up drugs and diseases; and productive downtime.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Sponsor mention and what the video covers: the iPad Pro at work as a junior doctor

  • ★★ Ali uses his iPad Pro and Apple Pencil at work as a junior doctor to be more efficient and productive, which he hopes means a better experience for his patients. (hedged) — 00:00:00 · iPad Pro, Apple Pencil

00:00:19 — Patient to-do lists in GoodNotes: the Dash Plus productivity system, the box shade system and colour highlights

  • ★★★ Ali keeps his patient to-do lists in GoodNotes on the iPad every day, using what he calls the Dash Plus productivity system. — 00:00:19 · GoodNotes, iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali is on his general surgery placement, where the team holds a board round with the consultants at half past seven every morning to discuss every patient. — 00:00:30
  • ★★ In the Dash Plus productivity system, every new task or piece of information from the board round is written down after a dash. — 00:00:40
  • ★★ In the Dash Plus productivity system, a task that is done has its dash turned into a plus. — 00:01:13
  • ★★ With the Dash Plus productivity system, Ali only has to find the dashes on his list to know what he has left to do. — 00:01:20
  • ★★ In the Dash Plus productivity system, a task pushed back to tomorrow gets a back arrow, a task a fellow junior doctor is helping with a forward arrow, and information needing no action a triangle. — 00:01:40
  • ★★ For multi-step processes Ali uses a method he says doctors everywhere use without a name, which he calls the box shade productivity system. — 00:02:00
  • ★★ In the box shade productivity system, a patient's blood test is a red box by the bed number, a line through it once requested, half shading once taken and full shading once the results are acted on. — 00:02:15
  • ★★ In GoodNotes Ali highlights urgent tasks in yellow, patients going home that day in green and anything to hand over to the night team in purple. — 00:02:44 · GoodNotes

00:02:59 — How the iPad fits with data protection: five safeguards, and why it is safer than paper lists

  • ★★ To fit data protection rules, Ali writes no patient-identifiable information on the iPad, only bed numbers and tasks. — 00:03:05 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali has installed his hospital's enterprise-level security certificates on his iPad, so the hospital's admin team can wipe it remotely if it is ever lost. — 00:03:14 · iPad Pro
  • ★ Ali's iPad is encrypted and protected with a password. — 00:03:20 · iPad Pro
  • ★★★ Ali never syncs patient to-do lists to iCloud: that is why he uses GoodNotes, with iCloud sync turned off, for them, and Notability, synced to iCloud for convenience, for everything else. — 00:03:30 · GoodNotes, Notability
  • ★★ Treating each GoodNotes document like a paper handover sheet that goes into the confidential waste, Ali deletes the day's document before leaving the hospital, so no patient data goes home on his device. — 00:03:55 · GoodNotes
  • ★★ Ali says he has discussed his use of the iPad for patient to-do lists with his hospital's senior management team, who are quite happy with it. — 00:04:12 · iPad Pro
  • ★★★ Ali thinks the main benefit of his iPad system is that it is much more secure than the printed paper patient lists doctors everywhere use, because a list is so easy to lose. — 00:04:20 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Hospitals around the UK, Ali says, have been fined hundreds of thousands of pounds for doctors leaving patient lists in places such as a sandwich bar or a cafe. — 00:04:30

00:04:41 — Electronic patient records on the iPad during consultant ward rounds

  • ★★ Ali's hospital in Cambridge, he says, was the first in the UK to go completely paperless, in 2014. — 00:04:41 · Cambridge
  • ★★ On consultant ward rounds Ali logs into the hospital's electronic record system on his iPad at the bedside and types the notes, with the patient's record, blood results and overnight vital signs to hand, instead of hunting for a computer on each ward. — 00:05:11 · iPad Pro

00:05:32 — Looking things up: the BNF app, Wikipedia, NICE guidelines and BMJ Best Practice

  • ★★ For a drug whose dose he cannot remember, Ali looks it up in the official British National Formulary app, which gives its indication, dose and interactions. — 00:05:40
  • ★★★ For anything mission-critical, such as the treatment algorithm for a heart attack or a stroke, Ali uses an official resource such as the NICE guidelines or BMJ Best Practice. — 00:06:20
  • ★★★ Ali sees nothing wrong with a doctor using Wikipedia to refresh his memory of a condition such as Tangier disease or Wallenberg syndrome. — 00:06:38 · Wikipedia
  • ★★ Looking things up on an iPad Pro on the ward, Ali says, looks much more professional than doing it on a phone, which patients may take for texting friends. — 00:07:07 · iPad Pro

00:07:14 — Productive downtime at work: Notion, emails and MRCP questions

  • ★★ With the iPad, Ali's downtime at work becomes productive: he might plan a video or two in Notion or reply to some emails. — 00:07:14 · iPad Pro, Notion
  • ★★ Having recently started preparing for the MRCP, his postgraduate medical exams, Ali does past paper questions on an online question bank in his downtime at work. — 00:07:30 · MRCP

00:07:44 — Skillshare sponsor read

00:08:43 — Sign-off pointing to his favourite iPad apps video

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali says this video is a re-upload: the original he posted in early 2019 missed the mark on taking issues like data protection seriously. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Dash Plus productivity system · GoodNotes · iPad Pro

Also: People: Thomas Frank

Works: MRCP

Organizations: BMJ · NICE · Wikipedia

Concepts: box shade productivity system · General surgery

Places: Cambridge

Products: Apple Pencil · BMJ Best Practice · British National Formulary · iCloud · Notability · Notion

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