Time is the asset that clinicians have less and less of.
Improved efficiency is the current push to help achieve an improved workload.
Furthermore digital solutions will offer means to improve care through standardisation of practice, but this is usually at a cost of a slightly increased demand on the clinician in terms of their time. Individual products may only add a small amount of time, but cumulatively the burden for clinicians rises and rises.
Buku Medicine has been made by volunteer clinicians who have experienced these slowly increasing demands, and who want to make something that helps save time for everyone involved in the specialist referral process, all whilst improving patient care.
Referrals are sent to specialist doctors to gather guidance on symptoms, signs or investigation results. They can also be direct requests for a review in clinic.
This is a core element of patient care, but referrals can be sent without all of the information that a specialist would need to answer the query and subsequently require a discussion back and forth with the referrer. This extends the time needed for that interaction the introduces delay for the patient. The referrer may also send a referral that could be answered with an easy to access resource - with so many online resources available it can sometimes seem overwhelming and a referral to a specialist seems like the best option in that scenario.
Not only do these scenarios introduce delays into patient care and add workload, but they can cause friction between referrers and specialists at a time when the clinical environment is so pressured.
As someone who gets easily frustrated with inefficiency and clunky digital systems, Alex, our founder created Buku Medicine in 2017 (as Buku Haematology) to provide a solution to these issues.
Over the last 8 years, with no funding for advertising, the App has achieved 48,000 downloads and has at least 32,000 active users per year. This has developed through word of mouth promotion alone by our users who trust our content and find it invaluable to their practice.
The popularity comes from the fact that Buku Medicine is free, requires no login, and contains only the information clinicians need to inform their query. It educates whilst improving care. It is always at their fingertips on their mobile devices or online, and the information needed can be accessed in seconds. It is aimed at all grades of generalist and specialist doctors, specialist nurses, physician assistants and more - anyone who might send a referral to a specialist.
Click below to see the impact Buku Medicine is having on clinicians and patients.
What does Buku mean?
'Buku' is the Chewa word for book or reference. Chichewa is spoken in Malawi where Steve, our co-founder, works on the charity pathology project, MPathE.