Health care has undergone major transformations in the past few years, spurred by sweeping reform legislation and new reimbursement and care delivery models.
But one thing has not changed much at all in the 30 years I have been in health care—how hospital staff members communicate with each other.
Communication still takes place largely via pagers, and in some cases, even walkie talkies. Meanwhile, two-way text messaging with smartphones has become the norm just about everywhere else.
At ProMedica, we are leapfrogging technology by switching from pagers to a healthcare communication platform. Communicating via secure smartphones is set to become the de facto standard in two of our departments at ProMedica Toledo Hospital, the Emergency Center (EC) and women's services. In the months ahead, we expect to expand mobile communications to even more departments. This will be made easily possible with an open, scalable platform that can securely facilitate communication throughout all our locations.
How a healthcare communications platform improves care
The catalyst for bringing modern communication to ProMedica was spurred by the largest construction project in our multi-site health system's history, a 13-story replacement patient care tower with more than 300 beds, all in larger, private rooms. Every aspect of the tower's physical layout is designed to enhance care, from reducing the walking time it takes caregivers to arrive at a patient's room, to making it easier for caregivers to collaborate with each other.
Clearly, it was an ideal time to make communication easier and faster, too. We decided to deploy a HIPAA-compliant, enterprise-grade healthcare communication platform from Voalte that can enable a diverse range of communication functions throughout different units and sites. At present, we use the platform to support secure, two-way messaging on smartphones. Because Voalte is an open, scalable platform, we're looking to eventually use it to manage physiological alarms and seamlessly integrate with our electronic health record.
We believe mobile communications will considerably improve patient throughput and workflow in the EC, also known as our front door. With more than 100,000 EC patient visits per year, any communication bottlenecks here can swiftly affect both patient safety and hospital workflow. But now that we have a complete smartphone infrastructure in place, communication will finally speed up to "real time." Additional features that facilitate fast communication include an employee directory that shows who is available in which department, and pre-written messages such as "patient has arrived."
For women's services, the new platform will be used to enable communication with people inside and outside the hospital, including midwives and on-call physicians. Secure text messaging is ideal for updates on delivery and other care surrounding labor (how reassuring to see a time stamp and read receipt). And it's an efficient way to communicate hospital-wide. So much time is historically spent on paging physicians; at ProMedica, we often have up to five operators at a time on one shift. With the new, easy way to text physicians, the same operators can be freed up to focus on more value-added tasks.
Some takeaways from our journey
Shifting to a smartphone communication infrastructure is a change many—eventually, most—hospitals will make. Each will have unique needs and considerations, but we learned a number of valuable lessons as we made this change that I'd like to pass on.
- Find out from your staff how they communicate. Talk to the clinical people and not just IT. You might be surprised to learn how inefficient some of the processes being used to communicate between patient units and departments, such as connecting with someone at facilities management to request a room be cleaned. It may amaze you to learn how many steps and people they have to go through to connect with one person about one issue.
- Do a facility-wide check on wireless coverage. Address any wireless weaknesses before implementing devices. This worked well for ProMedica with guidance from Voalte.
- Get key stakeholders on board early on. But beware of scope creep; more and more people will want to participate, although in our case it just validated that the entire hospital is hungry for good communication.
- Find the right partner to help you achieve your strategic goals. When shopping for a healthcare communication platform, be sure to consider whether you're making a basic purchase or a strategic investment. A recent KLAS report on secure messaging classifies 100+ vendors according to "basic" or "strategic." A vendor is strategic if they help customers make the most of their technology investments by integrating communications with existing systems, such as electronic health records, nurse call systems and alarm middleware.
Now more than ever, collaboration and good communication between caregivers are essential. Some of the changes happening in health care are actually making it harder to take care of patients. There are a lot of medical devices, electronic health record challenges, larger facilities and footprints—forces that seem to push caregivers further apart from each other and their patients. The simple key to bringing them back together, it turns out, is to simplify how they communicate.
Alison Avendt, MBA, is vice president of operations at ProMedica Toledo Hospital and president of ProMedica Transportation Network. ProMedica is a mission-based, not-for-profit healthcare organization serving northwest Ohio and southeast Michigan. The 13-hospital system has more than 17,000 employees, 2,300 physicians and more than 800 healthcare providers. For more information about ProMedica, visit www.promedica.org/aboutus.
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