“In healthcare, a lapse in communication between providers can have significant repercussions.
For one, hospital system miscommunication is costly. Journal of Healthcare Management published a study finding U.S. hospitals waste $12 billion annually on communications inefficiencies. Poor clinician communication can also negatively affect patient safety. The Joint Commission found the root cause in 21 percent of sentinel events — defined as an unanticipated adverse event in a healthcare setting resulting in death or substantial physical or psychological injury to a patient — to be communication errors.
The need to improve communication between clinicians is clear, but the process of doing so is less evident. Moreover, how can health systems facilitate seamless communication across a multi-hospital enterprise? The answer: employing the right technological tools.
‘It has truly been a fascinating evolution to see to see how healthcare communication has changed,’ said Andrew Mellin, MD, CMO of Spok, a company offering a complete communication platform that includes HIPAA-compliant texting, paging, on-call scheduling, clinical alerting, and contact center solutions. ‘Today, we have this very sophisticated, highly interconnected world where communication systems are core to keeping our health systems running’ …
Many hospitals and health systems do not have a change management program for implementing communication technology … ‘Governance isn’t just about the EHR. It’s about the application of technology and clinical care including [tools] like communication platforms,’ said Brian Griffith, MD, assistant professor of medicine of Duke Health. Leaders within Duke Health aim to meet the health system’s overall mission of ‘advancing healthcare together’ by focusing on communication, according to Eric Poon, MD, MPH, the health system’s chief health information officer. For providers across disciplines to effectively communicate, they have to have the right technology in place.
‘It is part of our role [as leaders] to maximize the use of existing technology and leverage new technologies to facilitate communication, whether that is in the domain of population health, increasing patient satisfaction or simply empowering the patient,’ Dr. Poon said.
Technologies can also alleviate many of the time constraints physicians face that affect their ability to communicate. Salisbury, Md.-based Peninsula Regional Medical Center employed Spok’s paging software to facilitate quick, effective communication between staff members.
‘We found some powerful ways to leverage the communication tools that are available from Spok,’ said Chris Synder, CMIO of Peninsula Regional Medical Center, a regional trauma center with 3,500 employees. ‘We are busy guys and ladies. We need to have these types of tools within our workflow and, if you can integrate this information into the EHR, it will drive people to want to use it.’ ”
The preceding quote from the article entitled “3 physician leaders on how emerging technologies drive effective communication” by Mary Rhectoris in the August 30, 2017 edition of Becker’s Hospital Review (http://bit.ly/2wVQU09), highlights the need for effective clinical communication and the potential contribution of information technology (IT) to meet this need. An IT solution compliant with the Cloud Healthcare Appliance Real-Time Solution as a Service reference architecture (CHARTSaaS RA) would facilitate effective clinical communication by enabling healthcare provider subject matter experts (SMEs) to automate processes such as complete, accurate and timely shift-change handoff communications with minimal cost and complexity, and little or no dependence on the provider’s IT staff or system resources.
CHARTSaaS-built apps would operate as systems of engagement with professional providers and their patients to leverage the on-premise legacy systems of record referred to as electronic health record (EHR) or hospital information systems (HIS) using secure intelligent interoperability. Furthermore, they would facilitate automation such problematic and error-prone use cases as differential diagnosis and treatment planning, and alarm/alert fatigue mitigation. Since such apps would be easily modifiable, they would facilitate both compliance with the accreditation standards of The Joint Commission that govern continuous process improvement and accrual of medical knowledge in a digitally based operational mode. And all these capabilities are facilitated by the fact that CHARTSaaS as a cloud-based solution as a service, designed for use in a hybrid cloud environment.
Please validate these CHARTSaaS RA-related propositions to your own satisfaction by reading the white paper at http://bit.ly/2vmK1Rx, viewing the tutorials posted on YouTube (http://bit.ly/2sVajvS and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5OtbCCDNLs) and also by reviewing the details of CHARTSaaS™ and the CHARTSaaS RA™ in these presentations:
https://mix.office.com/embed/19g5mpp3f6qkx
https://mix.office.com/embed/1bp3nuiwdjk86
https://mix.office.com/watch/o2y82frum3lt
Healthcare providers will benefit significantly from appreciating and then applying a CHARTSaaS RA-compliant IT solution. To do so will mitigate medical mistakes (currently the third leading cause of patient deaths. per Makaray and Daniel (http://bit.ly/1rtW6Sa); thereby minimizing patient adverse events and optimizing clinical case outcomes while maximizing the cost-effectiveness of care and treatment, and also accelerating the accrual and facilitating the application of medical knowledge.