Communication among hospital personnel can be inefficient. Throughout Johns Hopkins Medicine, clinicians are adopting a solution called CORUS, which was built by the Johns Hopkins Technology Innovation Center (TIC), to enable written, text-based conversations and to facilitate secure file sharing between individuals and among groups.

In early 2016, TIC began building CORUS to replace PING, the existing Johns Hopkins-developed web application for clinical communication. Even though PING was a success—it saw 35,000 users each month and sent 10,000 messages a day across the enterprise—it did not allow group conversations. In January 2017, PING users were invited to use CORUS Beta, which will launch officially this spring.

The new patent-pending CORUS features channels, or groups, that allow messages to be sent to every person in the group. It also interfaces with Epic so users can verify the members of a patient’s care team and a patient’s identifying information to ensure communication is taking place about the correct person. Users can search the conversations in CORUS by department, provider or patient name.

“Each hospital patient likely has people on his or her treatment team who work in disparate disciplines—and who don’t know each other by name. CORUS gives the team members a way to identify each other and a place to converse back and forth,” says Kelly Lynam Bystry, product development lead at TIC.

Thanks to an improvement in communication among clinicians, CORUS is projected to increase patient safety. The HIPAA-compliant, web-based application also supports file and photo sharing.

CORUS can be used across devices, including smartphones, tablets, pagers and desktop computers. Anyone with a JHED ID on the Johns Hopkins network can log in to CORUS or access it via mobile apps for Android or iOS devices.