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The first day of class in high school, my chemistry teacher
walked silently into the room after we were seated, took a dollar out of his
pocket, and put it in a glass jar on the podium. I was confused until he
explained that his actions represented what we did every day. As his students,
we were the source of his paycheck and were ultimately his boss. He ran the
classroom, but we had a voice.
I was reminded of this experience last week when I read an interview
in Healthcare Informatics between Rasu
B. Shrestha, M.D., and HCI Editor-in-Chief Mark Hagland about the 2012 Radiological
Society of North America (RSNA) annual conference. Although the article was a great overview of
some of the top trends and RSNA discussion topics, what really stuck with me
and prompted the dollar-in-the-jar memory was Dr. Shrestha’s last statement:
“Above all, you have to look at what is needed to become patient-centric, and
to enable the clinician workflow that can make that a reality.”
Looking at a
provider’s workflow and thinking “What can we change here to improve the
patient experience?” is something I do on a daily basis. Communication is a
large component of any clinician’s workflow; it takes time to gather
information about a patient from the EMR, colleagues, lab and imaging test results, verbal and text-based conversations, and personal observations…. Finding solutions
that can make these tasks more efficient is a win. Providers run the treatment
plans, but saving a little time on communications means having more time to
listen to the voice of the ultimate boss – the patient.
We
have heard from a number of clients that physicians and staff want to use
smartphones to do their jobs. In addition to calls, e-mail access and medical
apps, a big driver of this preference is the ability for providers to get all
the information they need on a single device because carrying multiple gadgets can
be cumbersome and time-consuming to manage.
While
developing a mobility strategy recently, one of our customers wanted a solution
that would allow their staff to use smartphones for all communications — including critical test results and code calls — and reduce the extra gadgetry.
On
August 15, Daniel DeBehnke, MD, Chief Clinical Integration Officer, and Ann
Tesmer, Director of Access Services, both at Froedtert
and The Medical College of Wisconsin, discussed how Amcom Mobile Connect is helping them improve patient
care, increase physician satisfaction and boost caregiver efficiency. They shared
some of the challenges they faced and the lessons they learned during their project
of introducing Amcom’s smartphone app for traceable, encrypted critical
communications.
If
you missed the presentation you still have an opportunity to see how leading
edge organizations are successfully making the mobile transition — it will be time
well spent. The webinar presentation was recorded and is available for viewing here.
We’re continuing to hear from hospitals of all sizes that they want to leverage their Cisco platforms as the foundation for other mission-critical messaging and communications such as Amcom. Case in point, Rockingham Memorial Hospital (RMH) has a Cisco wireless VoIP foundation and is working with us to address the needs of its mobile staff. This 238-bed hospital in Harrisonburg, Va., is implementing Amcom's encrypted smartphone messaging, Web-based directory / on-call scheduling, and emergency notification solutions. The hospital contact center will also use Amcom's call recording solution to improve call center quality, monitor compliance, and evaluate operator training needs. RMH chose Amcom in part due to its Cisco integration strategy and for its breadth of products that provide the ability to create a succinct communications flow throughout the hospital.You can read the press release we issued this week to learn more.
Any comments or thoughts on how you’re seeing Cisco used for advanced messaging or workflows today?
Now that 2012 is upon us, and given the new possibilities of smartphones, we assembled a roundtable of industry and technology experts to compile a list of what 2012 will mean for smartphone use in hospitals. We even created a report about it.
The panel believes 2012 will be a transformational year for smartphones in healthcare. 2009-2011 focused on smartphone adoption. 2012 will be very different. It will mark the beginning of an era in which hospitals really figure out how to take these devices beyond their use as individual reference tools and turn them into technology that is truly interconnected throughout the enterprise.
The exciting news is that people are becoming very clever with how to use them in new ways to make meaningful improvements in healthcare. With emerging capabilities far beyond phone calls, email, and even access to medical apps, smartphones have kicked off not only a communications revolution, but a productivity one as well.
So with that, these are the 10 predictions for what we’ll be seeing this year. We’ll know in a few short months whether these are on the money! (If you’d like the full detail on each of these, you can check out the report after a short form).- Hospitals will start doing even smarter things with smartphones to make them an essential part of everyday healthcare communications
- An incident involving compromised protected health information (PHI) on a smartphone will cause headlines and fines
- The proliferation of different mobile communication devices gets worse
- Traceability becomes a requirement, not a luxury
- Pagers RIP? Nope. The prediction of the death of pagers will be proved wrong
- Specialized communication hardware devices will fail to gain traction
- Web out, apps in
- Hospitals raise the “Now What?” question with tablets
- Hospitals will deliver comprehensive mobile strategies
- IT and BioMed will join forces in the name of improved workflows
Any thoughts?
