Check, Please

Imagine going to dinner with a friend who’s suggested a hot new restaurant. And as it turns out, he was right - the food was great, and the service outstanding. Now here comes the check, and the inevitable question: Who pays? Your friend was the one who recommended the place, but you’ve had a great meal.

This same stare down is also taking place at hospitals across the country, only no one can escape to the restroom to avoid the check. In healthcare it’s become a question of who pays for the wave of smartphones continually flowing into healthcare facilities. We, of course, have kept tabs on the smartphone trend, and wondered who was picking up the tab. So, as we often do, we asked our customers at a few of our regional user conferences.

The simple answer: There is no answer. Our user community has reported several different models within their hospitals, but the industry seems far from any sort of standard practice.

Some facilities take a more aggressive approach, where both IT and physicians agree that smartphones are a must. These facilities tend to be the ones who are paying for (and supporting) smartphones, typically choosing to standardize on a single platform. BlackBerry tends to be far and away the most popular, probably due to BES integration (BlackBerry Enterprise Server). With this comes a layer of data protection, in that a lost device can be remotely wiped of any data it may contain. Super safe for HIPAA compliance.

Other facilities seem to want to avoid the support headache that goes along with having hundreds of new smartphones put in the hands of users who may be both less than gentle and less than tech savvy. Still, the demand is there and IT teams are stepping up to support the docs who are using their personal smartphones for hospital-related communications.

Yet another camp seems to be a bit more about sharing, where IT teams are welcoming staff members’ personal smartphones, and administrators have agreed to share the costs. So hospitals will pay staff members for some of their monthly bill, figuring that a proportional amount of use will be hospital-related. A moderately cost-effective approach, but it does add separate costs in the form of administrative effort.

So what’s the best model? We have no idea. There are pros and cons to each. Are you looking to reduce costs but willing to give up a bit of data control? Is money no object when it comes to HIPAA compliance and mobile capabilities? Like people choosing a favorite restaurant, every hospital has its own tastes too.

We’d love to hear your views on who pays for these devices within your hospital. Leave us a note below!

Closing the Loop

“He said-She said” can be an ugly game. It becomes even uglier when set in the context of patient safety, and it pits caregivers against one another following a sentinel event.

When something does occur, inevitably there are a number of questions. Even though the page log can show a message was sent, there are a string of unanswered questions that follow. Did the physician receive the page regarding the situation? Did he or she read the message? Was the appropriate action taken?

More often than not, hospitals do not have the ability to answer these questions because the most common method of communication – paging – doesn’t provide the answers. That’s when the “He said-She said” game begins.

Now, what if we were able to easily access an audit trail for these critical messages? An audit trail which was automatically generated at each step of the message flow, which even showed when the recipient received and read the message? The ability for administrators to prove that the correct steps were taken – or to reveal where deficiencies may exist – would be invaluable.

This closed-loop communications approach could potentially trigger a domino effect, whereby the realization that an audit trail exists causes everyone to be a bit more careful in how incoming messages are handled. More complete message audit trails better satisfy Joint Commission recommendations, and both patient safety and patient satisfaction would increase as a result.

This ideal scenario is one of the reasons we developed Amcom Mobile Connect, which provides an audit trail covering all the stages in the message path. Most importantly, it provides detail concerning the message and the device itself: when the message was received by the device, a read receipt once the message has been opened, user acknowledgement, and even free-form text responses. As we’ve started putting in Amcom Mobile Connect at many hospitals, this feature is getting a lot of positive buzz.

Sound like something that would be important to your hospital’s management and legal teams?

We’d love to hear your thoughts on closed loop communications and the requirements and effects within your facility. Leave us a note below!

The Importance of Fitting In

Raise your hand if you’ve already got more systems in place than you’d ideally like to manage. Now keep it up if you want to message with smartphones, but dread the idea of introducing yet another system with its own database. OK, you can put your hand down now.

Most of the systems out there designed to deliver messages to smartphones include some sort of web-based portal for inputting the message, and often this includes visibility to a full audit trail for the message path. However, where does such a system get its data? Does it integrate with something you’ve already got in place? Probably not - which means another database for someone to manage and keep current. Just what you need!

Your high-level goal then should be simple: being able to send a message to one or many people and have it be received simultaneously, regardless of the device each person is using. Sending the message should require a single system that pulls relevant contact information from a single database which supplies information to operator consoles, on-call schedules, and other related applications. The sender shouldn’t have to go from system to system to message to different types of devices. That wastes times and introduces errors and inefficiency, especially when tracking responses and monitoring escalation rules.

The good news is that with the right system, you can integrate smartphone messaging as a piece of your existing infrastructure. This makes everyone happy, including the IT team administering things on the back end. Integration also improves patient safety with the ability to reach staff quickly using the right contact information the first time around.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the challenges you’re seeing within your hospital when it comes to physicians and other staff member going more mobile. Leave us a note below!