The adoption of new technology in healthcare has always posed a unique challenge, both for clinical end users and for leadership. When patient care is on the line, an organization’s first priority is always to ensure health and safety, so it’s easy to see why some facilities fall behind on the technological frontier.

However, increasingly, health systems and community hospitals alike are becoming unable to avoid the rapid pace of health-tech innovation. This year in particular, healthcare organizations have a vested interest in establishing and maintaining a reliable and interoperable technology infrastructure that supports the organization’s unique needs.

Despite setbacks from the coronavirus pandemic, many organizations are revisiting their technology strategies to streamline clunky legacy systems and provide a single, unified tool for their frontline employees.

At Mobile Heartbeat, we specialize in this process of optimizing clinical workflows by rolling out a clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) platform custom-built for the organization. While the process of deploying this kind of technology is nuanced and highly variant from facility to facility, there is one phase, in particular, that is critical to the project, and that is clinical discovery, or clinical assessment.

What Is Clinical Discovery?

Clinical discovery is a methodology we employ at Mobile Heartbeat to develop a thorough implementation plan that is completely unique to each organization, facility and unit. The process begins with a series of interviews between our implementation specialists and key stakeholders at the customer site, including clinical leaders, project managers and IT team members.

The interview questions have been developed and validated over hundreds of go-lives to make sure any and all relevant information is discussed and included in the build strategy. Most often, we will discuss any and every process that takes place in the unit that is receiving the platform, including:

  • the roles of the staff who work there
  • the tools they use on a day-to-day basis (EHR, nurse call, etc.)
  • common workflows or hospital protocols

These interviews are designed to provide our team with everything we need to know in order to tailor the platform to the needs of your users.

A graph depicting different methods and modes of communicating within the hospital

How Does the Clinical Discovery Process Work?

First and foremost, we provide our customers a dashboard that is updated in real time with any new information, including comprehensive project timelines, important forms, instructional documentation and contact information for all stakeholders.

After we’ve completed the discovery interviews, we use the input to develop a dedicated build document. The document is shared with everyone involved in the project, and includes specific strategies for leveraging CC&C technology to streamline existing workflows and other clinical operations.

Why Should We Do A Clinical Assessment?

The clinical discovery phase may seem like extra work. But without it, the technology being implemented would be exactly the same across all units, facilities and organizations. Without the variables that distinguish the needs and goals of your organization, the technology is more likely to fail.

This discovery and assessment process led to a breakthrough for our customers at HCA Healthcare affiliates Chippenham Hospital and Johnston-Willis Hospital. These sister facilities have a robust transfer center with unique communication needs compared with other departments.

When they went live with our CC&C platform a few years ago, we performed a discovery assessment and found that their transfer center and emergency department staff were having to quickly switch between pagers and headsets in order to coordinate patient plans. Clinicians liked the instantaneous nature of the pagers, but lacked necessary information about the page recipient, such as availability and delivery status.

 

Once we discovered this pain point, we were able to facilitate the implementation of a customized paging and messaging system that would allow transfer center and ED staff to use just one platform on a single device to perform the bulk of their communications. Clinicians can now rest easy knowing their messages were delivered to the correct, available colleague, instantly.

By providing an opportunity to align across all departments and all stakeholders, we are better able to facilitate a smooth go-live and effortless collaborative experience for end users. With clear access to all the resources you and your team need to coordinate internal procedures, our clinical discovery process allows us to handle the rest.

For more information on how this process works, visit our Professional Services page, or contact us here.