Achieving Maximum Patient Satisfaction Through Effective Clinical Communications

摘要

How has the landscape around time-sensitive communications between and among clinicians and others in patient care delivery, evolved in the past few years? For decades, care teams have relied on unencrypted paging hardware to receive notice of urgent patient-care situations. However, legacy pagers presented the opportunity for a HIPAA violation when used to exchange sensitive patient data. Pagers delivered uncoordinated, fragmented one-way communications, and prolonged the delivery of care while increasing the patient's average length of stay (ALOS) in hospitals. Today, hospitals are increasingly supporting Wi-Fi networks and promoting the use of HIPAA-compliant smartphone communications. We're seeing smartphone paging services improve healthcare operations through intelligent alerting and automation, helping care teams enhance accountability and responsiveness in the process. Smartphone pagers accelerate care delivery in hospitals and facilitate the sharing of information between clinicians. What have we learned from experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic about how to optimize time-sensitive communications around patient care? COVID-19 exposed the presence of fragmented communications in healthcare and showed how hospitals were unprepared to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude. Clinicians that used traditional pagers during the pandemic had difficulty communicating with colleagues in real time. The entire page and phone tag cycle introduced inefficiencies that hindered care delivery.