Although quick and efficient, texting can also present challenges when it comes to securing protected health information and ensuring HIPAA compliance.
Ventura (Calif.) County Medical Center CMO Bryan Wong, MD, and Marc Ladin, chief marketing officer of TigerText, presented a webinar discussing how secure texting allows organizations to accelerate delivery of critical information, enhance patient care and diagnoses, and increase staff collaboration and reliability.
VCMC began exploring its options regarding secure, HIPAA-compliant texting roughly two years ago when executives realized how often physicians used their mobile devices as an alternative to pagers and traditional phones. While texting cut down on time and improved efficiency, it left patient information vulnerable to HIPAA violations.
To minimize this security risk, VCMC turned to TigerText.
“What we’ve found is that TigerText is not just a solution for HIPAA-compliant texting — though it does an excellent job of that — it really has become a solution for improved workflows and outcomes in our hospital,” said Dr. Wong.
VCMC began launching secure texting on a physician-to-physician basis, focusing first on hospitalists, residents and surgeons, all groups which were already fairly tech-savvy and willing to gravitate toward the new tool.
Dermatologists, radiologists, pathologists, nurses and pharmacists were all eventually added to TigerText with great results. All across the board, VCMC has seen improvements in workflows and a reduction in alarm fatigue.
Specifically, the hospital has estimated TigerText has saved an average of 15 minutes between the time a clinician is paged to when they actually respond and reduced the number of pages physicians receive, ultimately saving two to three hours of time spent trying to connect with one another per a 24-hour shift.
Going forward, VCMC also plans to expand TigerText services to its ambulatory and specialty care providers and clinics.
According to both Dr. Wong and Mr. Ladin, the following features of TigerText have proven particularly popular among clinicians who use the tool.
- TigerText allows the sender to see when their message has been successfully delivered as well as read by the recipient.
- The tool allows physicians and clinicians to switch on a “do not disturb” function that can display a message directing others of who to contact in their absence.
- File attachment capabilities mean healthcare workers can share lab results, images, consultations, voice notes and other documents to accelerate patient diagnosis.
- TigerText can integrate with other healthcare tools, such as EMRs, answering services and scheduling applications.
- Group messaging gives workers the ability to communicate with multiple staff members at once.
- End-to-end encryption ensures messages sent over TigerText are secured while in transit as well as at rest.
- TigerText offers a $1 million guarantee that every message will remain secure, putting the minds of executives and physicians alike at ease.
Hospitals and health systems that use TigerText have found, on average, the tool decreases patient wait times by 50 percent, allow nurses to see 15 more patients per shift and reduce email and phone tag by 80 percent, according to Mr. Ladin.
Additionally, 95 percent of TigerTexts are responded to in less than 60 seconds, a huge improvement when compared to traditional communications methods that take much longer.
“TigerText helps hospitals get patients in more quickly and out more quickly,” said Mr. Ladin. “That means hospitals can see more patients and, from a bottom line perspective, they can keep patient beds filled and can treat as many people as possible.”
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