The start up Siilo Messenger has reached a milestone of 140,000 unique users, doubling its user base in less than 12 months.
The GDPR compliant messaging and collaboration platform for health and care was founded in 2016 by a former doctor and surgeon and reached 70,000 users in June last year. Since then more than 60 NHS organisations are now embracing the secure messaging app with some individual departments exchanging over 15,000 messages each month.
For years, the use of WhatsApp in the NHS has been prevalent, despite the well-known GDPR and privacy issues and risks associated with the consumer messaging service. Siilo’s secure messaging platform has also been widely praised for the ways in which it can be used to replace multiple pieces of outdated – and soon to be banned – NHS technology such as fax machines and pagers.
Amongst the most prolific of NHS users is St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Darren Lui, a Spinal and Orthopedic Surgeon at the Trust said: “I wanted to find a solution that delivered the balance between convenience, practicality and compliance. “We wanted a sophisticated app which worked seamlessly as a messenger but with added security measures to ensure patient confidentiality was no longer at risk.”
“As an Orthopaedic Surgeon, I take a lot of photographs and knowing that they are secure within Siilo is a big winner. You can’t get away from the fact that photography – hands down – has to be used through something like Siilo. There is simply no comparison for compliance, GDPR and patient safety.”
Joost Bruggeman, CEO and co-founder of Siilo, said: “The uptake of Siilo has been phenomenal. It’s comforting to know that health and care professionals taking the importance of using secure, GDPR compliant messengers seriously but also recognising the benefits of additional functionality that enables such solutions to slot into their workflows and enabling them to integrate specific information into the patient record.
“Unlike WhatsApp, Siilo empowers health and care professionals with the ability to focus on delivering quality care without the fears and anxieties of breaching patient confidentiality.”
