Healthcare Is a Team Sport

I recently read an interview with Emory Healthcare’s CEO John Fox in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The bulk of the piece centered on effectively changing the hospital culture to improve quality, and then one sentence jumped right out at me: “Healthcare is a team sport.” Mr. Fox was speaking about a team of people, of course, but this also includes supporting technology – team players can significantly improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare.

If you think about a typical visit to the hospital, there are a plethora of systems that get touched from the moment a patient enters the hospital doors until well after he or she leaves. If I were team captain, I would want all of my players to talk with one another and coordinate their efforts. Can the admitting hospitalist on duty be reached quickly for a consultation? Do lab test results automatically update in a patient’s EMR? How about you? Do your communication systems and technologies act like team players to support and improve the game of your staff?