A big part of what I do is figuring out how to improve communications in businesses and organisations. I put the pieces in place to make things easier and cut down on unwieldy processes. Increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
Increasingly, we’re being asked to apply our unified communications thinking into healthcare facilities and hospitals where paper-based processes and traditional communication systems still prevail.
Unified communications can really address both improvements in patient care and improvements in operating efficiencies and cost.
Think about clinicians or mobile workers who move through healthcare institutions, needing access to things right away. If we create ways to help them find people or equipment or medical records more quickly and effectively then that will surely help drive better patient care.
There are other things that unified communications helps improve. Things like more efficient nursing and more efficient use of the resources – tending to patients rather than spending time calling and waiting for messages.
Recently we’ve been putting this thinking into action at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne which is the state’s major specialist paediatric facility.
Their existing communications structure had a heavy reliance on the call and wait scenario. Essentially using conventional pagers and wired telephones and being put on hold and directed to voicemails with no way of knowing when messages were actually received and acted upon.
We had to look at how we could help the hospital improve patient care by addressing the problem of getting the right resources and information to the right people at the right time. Dramatically reducing response times among clinicians and other support staff, as well as management personnel.
So we set up IBM’s Mobility Solutions with Vocera which enables instant wireless voice communication that users can control with naturally spoken commands. Mobile staff members - everyone from clinicians, doctors and nurses - now wear a Vocera communication badge which operates with simple voice commands.
The voice prompt instantly connects staff to the people they need which eliminates phone tag, the noise pollution created by overhead paging and the need to physically search for a person, hospital equipment and patient records. No more call and wait!
This solution has provided a number of clear benefits for the Royal Children’s Hospital including the ability to contact clinicians while they attend to patients, access to patient information at the bedside, and ease of location of hospital equipment and patient records. The hospital has also reported an increased level of staff satisfaction.
Overall, I think the benefits are clear and a unified communications approach can help healthcare providers significantly improve the quality of patient care. Reducing the frequency of medical errors and making doctors, nurses, and health care administrators much more efficient.
Putting together the technology solution and providing a way to make healthcare processes more effective in healthcare facilities is going to deliver huge value to both the hospital and the community.
See the vodcast on how Unified Communications helped one healthcare facility, Samarinda Lodge.