Rolling out an enterprise communication platform at your hospital can seem like a massive undertaking—with so many moving parts, where do you even begin? Mobile Heartbeat will guide you through every step of the installation process, and one of the most crucial things that we do is set you up for operational success. Our goal is to create a client team that can support you and keep your clinical workflow moving smoothly.

I’ve learned a lot during my eight years at Mobile Heartbeat—we’re installed in 120 hospitals now and recently hit 100,000 monthly active users. With such a robust foundation, I’ve seen it all in terms of implementations, so I know what can go right and what can go wrong.

Every hospital is different, so knowing how to compile a mobility team that works for your specific hospital can feel like a daunting task. However, my goal is to make this process easier for you, so I’ve compiled this guide of best practices so you have an idea of where to begin.

1. Assign a Dedicated Tech-Savvy Project Manager

A considerable amount of planning and cross-functional collaboration is necessary to enable effective communication in healthcare environments. For this reason, your project manager should understand the value of implementing a clinical communication platform like MH-CURE. They should also be able to coordinate the various departments that need to be involved in making this a success.

As clinical communication spans both the technical and clinical sides of a hospital, it helps to have someone that is already familiar with both sides—this could be someone involved in rolling out EMR updates or CPOE. The most successful projects we’ve run tend to start with an infrastructure and a well-defined process for connecting to alerting systems. These systems could support standard nurse call use cases or advanced AI-based alerting use cases such as sepsis prevention. Regardless, having a process in place to integrate with an alerting system is key. Therefore, the project manager should be comfortable with technology and able to deliver against the benchmarks your clinical leadership has set.

2. Visionary Clinical Leaders Are Key

Without a comprehensive understanding of your hospital’s clinical workflows, your mobile communication solution may not be as successful as you’d like. For that reason, clinical leadership should understand the time-, cost- and life-saving measures a communication platform can offer each of the care teams.

I’ve seen multiple clients face an uphill battle when they don’t engage the clinical leadership team early enough—they aren’t able to set the policy required to build up their core network, and it can derail the whole project.Fortunately, a little preparation can help you avoid this problem. Our Clinical Implementation team will help you:

  • Set your smartphone policy.
  • Highlight clinical workflows to address.
  • Create a communication plan to educate and inform your users.
  • Provide a set of benchmarks you can measure success against.

3. Get A Product Owner Who Can Deliver

A great product owner will be the driving force for executing on and delivering the vision that clinical leadership has. This person should be able to leverage our growing platform for minimal end-user disruptions, application updates and monthly security patches.

Many hospitals have specific workflow needs when setting up their communication systems, and the product owner is responsible for communicating those needs to us during installation. We partner with all of our sites and often, the product owner’s requests help us develop communication workflows to bring users back to the bedside. For the application enhancements to be available you need a team that can manage the devices.

4. Find Your “Glass Team”

A number of organizations are developing a mobile device management (MDM) team or a “glass team” that provides support for anything with a touchscreen. These teams tend to fit very well into the established IT departments at our client hospitals.

While building a glass team might not be possible at smaller hospitals, we recommend it because MDM contributes to the mobility of clinicians. MDM is also a key component of our rollout, and we work with our clients on the front line to keep MH-CURE working for your clinical teams.

The practice of tracking and maintaining mobile devices has improved significantly over the years but is still far behind the desktop PC tools that are available. Device tracking is an ongoing process that we will help put in place to keep devices available to end users, fully charged with the applications that are needed.

5. Establish A Support Team

As with any new technology, the first point of escalation for users is contacting the support team. That’s why establishing a support team is so important when you’re rolling out a new communication platform.

We have worked with a number of different support teams and can develop a support matrix to provide a timely and efficient response to end-user issues, from device Wi-Fi problems to nurse call alert optimization. We also organize training sessions and provide materials to keep your support team up-to-date on new releases and solutions.

With your mobility team in place, you’re one step closer to implementing practices for effective communication in healthcare. Fortunately, Mobile Heartbeat can help you the rest of the way. Learn more about how we can transform the way you communicate with your clinical team.