In the shift to value-based care, hospitals and health systems have been tasked with improving quality, efficiency, and accountability of care, while finding ways to decrease costs.
It's a daunting task. But a good place to start is by leveraging new technologies and better utilizing existing resources. This can help drive operational efficiencies and improve overall patient outcomes.
It is increasingly important to facilitate the coordination of patient care across treatments, providers, and settings in order to provide care that is safe, timely, and effective. One way to improve care coordination is to increase the level of connectivity between clinical systems. Real-time communication requires seamless integration between systems to ensure clinicians have the right information at the right time. Hospitals should turn their attention to technologies that can play a greater role in enhancing health care delivery and creating operating efficiencies, allowing for more integrated, secure, and consistent workflows while also reducing inefficiencies and medical mistakes.
Technology that enables real-time care team communication and collaboration is critically important as communication-related failures are the third-leading cause of death and accidental injury in hospitals. These failures are a major source of inefficiency and poor patient experience, and cost hospitals approximately $12B every year.
Care coordination has improved over the past few years with the adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems. They provide the ability to capture patient health information and distribute it to the entire care team for better collaboration. As a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provided Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments for the effective use of EHRs, the number of U.S. hospitals with a basic EHR system has nearly tripled since 2010, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's 2013 Health Information Technology in the United States report.
To further advance care team collaboration, it is necessary to integrate health system communication platforms with EHRs and other clinical systems currently in use, such as nurse call systems. This integration empowers clinicians to deliver better, more efficient care across the patient's journey by remaining connected with the latest patient information.
Integration with patient monitoring systems is another good example of how technology can improve safety and efficiency. False alarms in hospitals account for between 72 and 99 percent of all clinical alarms. Not surprisingly, this can cause clinicians to become desensitized to alarms and create patient safety issues due to a lack of response to life threatening problems. An improper or delayed response to an alarm not only can mean the difference between life and death but also can impact patient satisfaction when patients are left alone in rooms with alarms sounding. Connectivity between clinical systems, EHRs and communication systems improves the quality of patient-centered care.
Improving care coordination and patient experience is especially important in today's healthcare environment, as reimbursement will continue to move towards more value-based payment models. In fact, at the beginning of this year, the United States Health and Human Services (HHS) announced its plan to more quickly move the Medicare program toward paying providers based on the quality rather than the quantity of care given to patients. HHS set a lofty goal of tying 85 percent of all traditional Medicare payments to quality or value by 2016, and 90 percent by 2018, through programs such as the Hospital Value Based Purchasing and the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Programs.
Hospitals and physicians plan to implement new technologies to ensure seamless care coordination and close the gaps in patient care. According to a recent Frost and Sullivan report, the care coordination software market is expected to grow by more than 26 percent between 2015 and 2020. While coordination technologies can vary in function, the need for integration, real-time communication and the ability to provide analysis and reporting to key stakeholders are important to address the complex financial and operational challenges that hospitals will continue to face.
It remains imperative for hospitals and health care systems to focus on reducing costs by leveraging available platforms and technologies, optimizing workflows in clinical environments and addressing some of the biggest issues in health care that stem from poor communication. Better instant communication and collaboration improves patient care and safety, which leads to higher patient satisfaction, higher reimbursements and fewer readmissions. Those are priorities that both hospitals and patients can agree on.
Brent Lang is the president and CEO of Vocera, which is aiming to transform how healthcare is delivered through better real-time care team communication.