Real-time communication boosts care coordination and prevents delays in care, ultimately delivering enhanced patient care.
Jose Barreau, MD, CEO and co-founder of Doc Halo, discusses why quick and secure communication is the foundation of a health system and how Doc Halo aligns with the overall goals of value-based care.
Question: Based on your experience as a physician, what is the most common communication problem providers face? Why is quick and secure communication between physicians, nurses and clinical staff so critical to patient care?
Dr. Jose Barreau: The most common problem we see across health systems and the first one we address is reaching the right person at the right time. Knowing which physician is covering or on-call and which nurse is caring for a patient is at the core of healthcare communication and every system needs help doing this to prevent delays in care. Once you do this well the second step is getting the critical labs, alerts and imaging results to the clinicians who ordered them immediately.
Q: What prompted you to co-found Doc Halo? Have you accomplished the original goal of streamlining real-time communication and coordinating care? And how many healthcare organizations use your solutions today?
JB: We founded Doc Halo to give nurses, physicians and other healthcare professionals protection from the mounds of data collected on patients everyday with no filter to help them know what needs to be addressed in real-time to help a patient. By having a real-time platform that is only used for the transfer of real-time communication and information (critical, urgent and pressing) we make their jobs easier and prevent delays of care. We have more than 200 health systems using Doc Halo, ranging from national organizations like Trinity Health to large academic institutions like University of Maryland Health System.
Q: How does your solution, Halo Messaging, contribute to the value-based care paradigm, and what unique features does it offer?
JB: The Halo Communication Platform offers three levels of functionality.
A. Secure communication: Halo Messaging with 30 specific healthcare messaging features and Halo Soft for making VoIP phone calls.
B. Care Coordination: Includes Halo Pronto, which is a system wide on-call and clinical team management system.
C. Clinical Integrations: Includes Halo Connect that allows The Halo Platform to be the end point for critical alerts, nurse call, critical labs, critical imaging, care teams and more.
Value-based care means providing value for patients and providing high quality healthcare is the best to do it. We know preventing delays in care is very important in achieving these goals and a real-time communication platform is the foundation that allows health systems to prevent delays of care.
Q: Within the company's care coordination platform, Doc Halo offers Halo Pronto, Patient Halo and Halo Handoff addressing scheduling, patient engagement and patient transitions, respectively. Why did Doc Halo decide to build solutions for these three areas, specifically?
JB: When we deploy across a health system with multiple hospitals we need to unite all schedules on one platform for viewing and messaging. Whether you make your on-call or clinical team schedule with our scheduling tool or not, the entire system must view it on one common platform and that is the unique nature of our schedule management system Halo Pronto. Additionally, our large health system partners have facilities, clinics and other practices that are not employed but clinically affiliated. Halo transitions will allow them to share contact lists, schedules and other important information across organizations for better contiguous patient care.
Q: Why should an organization leverage Doc Halo's systems integration solution? How does Doc Halo prevent alarm fatigue and boost clinical integration?
JB: Nurses outnumber physicians five to one on our system. We are an end point to nurse call and alarm management systems. Many times when we first come onsite we see nurses being hit very hard by information, alerts and notifications coming from every corner of a hospital. The Joint Commission did make a concerted effort to help nurses with the alarm management initiative but we are seeing mixed results on this across health systems. In many health systems, nurses are not being protected from alarm flood like we had hoped. This is one of those problems that is not necessarily fixed by technology but really needs academic thinking to identify which alarms are actually needed and which alarm threshold values are appropriate. In our opinion technology is only as good as the human thinking behind it and the top findings from The Joint Commission sentinel events on alarms for the most part are not technology problems but knowledge and standardization problems.
Halo Connect integrations are specific and for real-time purposes. A STAT Lab or critical lab to the ordering physician or critical imaging results from the radiology PACS system are two of six real-time clinical integration we offer. Again, we only want to integrate to obtain information that needs attention now in real-time.
Q: Within the clinical communication sector, what do you believe still demands improvement? How do you see Doc Halo helping?
JB: In our opinion there are two very important areas that demand improvement in the healthcare communication space. The first is protecting nurses and physicians from data and information overload. Identifying what is important information for a nurse or a physician and making it easy for them to get it is at the core of our mission and needs continuous improvement. Along with alarm flood, information flood is real and affecting nurses and physicians everyday. We should all continue to think about ways to make more decisions upstream that will result in less but more important information reaching clinicians downstream. If this is not done we fear it will lead to burnout of our brightest minds and eventually lower quality of care.
The second is patient engagement. Finding innovative ways to engage patients and keep them engaged is challenging. There are only so many times someone will look at their medical record and in our opinion EHR patient portals have not been effective engagement tools. Doc Halo is fortunate to have such a large professional communication base inside the health system that gives us a unique opportunity to provide patient engagement tools that will make a real impact on patient health.
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