Last week marked 100 days in lockdown for us in the UK and depending on what field your business operates in; you’ve probably witnessed some of your greatest operational highs or lows in the past three months. For health techs like ours, the pace has at least tripled.
There’s nothing like an international pandemic to test the limits of our NHS and we’ve all been astonished with the agility and hard work that all our NHS heroes have put in, to look after our nation.
We’ve had to think quickly.
In his recent interview with Sky News our founder Tom said “It feels as if someone’s taken the handbreak off the NHS. It’s like it’s been given permission to go fast”. An institution that has traditionally been cautious of digital transformation has had to come to companies like ours to look for help in looking after patients remotely. To ensure patients still receive care regardless of their physical location, as it’s been essential for hospitals to protect their inpatients and staff from the spread of Covid.
For our team, this has meant many late nights innovating. How do we best help our existing partner Trusts provide creative ways of care? How do we best help them communicate with their staff and patients in real-time, often en masse and with as little friction as possible?
Our nerds have done what they do best; code away across multiple time zones. Our product team have been finetuning our solution to ensure accessibility and user-friendly functionalities for health providers and patients alike. And our transformers have been listening to our clients around the clock to provide help and support and often virtual hand holding via zoom.
We’ve built 7 new products during quarantine and managed to build a whole video consultation platform from scratch in 5 weeks. It seems like DrDoctor has had its handbreak taken off…
Ask anyone who works in or around DrDoctor and they’ll likely say the best thing about us is our culture. We certainly take great pride in it and share really similar values across teams. Right now and for the foreseeable our team efforts are invested in helping the NHS recover, and reset the way patients are looked after.
As coronavirus has accelerated the digital appetite of the NHS, it’s our job to ensure our transformation work is sustainable, scalable and serves as the ‘new normal’ so that all patients will benefit. Going forward all patients should receive care in their chosen format, via their chosen medium and at a time that suits them best with minimal life disruption where possible.
Last month during one of our Friday afternoon mammoth Zoom sessions our founders Tom, Perran & Rinesh told us it’s time for DrDoctor to recover and reset. In order to do that we’re all taking a day off together; the DrDoctor bank holiday.
The momentum with the NHS is here now so we will keep working strongly as a team to deliver on our mission at pace. But this Friday the office is closed and we’re all going to catch up on sleep and rest; to recover and reset.