Aptus Aware

Aptus Aware puts clinical communication on the devices care staff already carry. Nurse calls, presence and escalation stop being a fixed panel on a wall and become something that follows the right person.

What I worked on

I am the product champion here as well as an engineer — responsible for what the thing should be, not only for how it gets built.

The core of it is an interface that puts the nursing system on a phone. A nurse call has historically been a fixed panel, wired into a building and answered by whoever happens to be standing near it. Moving that onto the device someone is already carrying changes who can answer, and from where.

The device is where it gets interesting, because there are two of them. Some staff use a phone the organisation issues and manages; others use their own. A managed handset is shared across shifts, so the identity that matters is the person on duty rather than the device itself. A personal phone the organisation does not control brings the opposite problem: no guarantee about the OS version, the network it sits on, or whether the system will let a notification through after the screen has been dark for an hour. A clinical alert cannot be best-effort. Both paths have to put the call in front of the right person with the same certainty.

I also work on feature delivery and the backend services behind it.

Current work

The current work is integrating Aptus Aware with Aptus Concierge, including its AI layer — so that the communications product and the concierge side stop being two systems a member of staff has to hold in their head at once.

The Matrix migration

The most interesting piece has been a proof of concept moving the messaging backend onto Matrix, the open federated messaging protocol, and then reviewing and migrating backend code onto it.

Clinical messaging has requirements that consumer chat does not: messages have to be attributable long after the shift ends, presence has to be derived rather than self-reported, and a call that nobody answers has to escalate to somebody who will. Matrix gives you federation, a real event graph and self-hosting — which matters when the data is clinical and cannot simply live on someone else’s servers.

Presence is the part that looks simple and is not. Automatic presence means the system infers who is available from where they are, rather than asking them to set a status they will forget to change. Hunt-group routing then walks a call down an ordered list of people until someone picks up.