In today’s healthcare environment, clinicians spend a significant amount of time in the EHR coordinating patient care. Care team members across the healthcare spectrum collaborate and take detailed notes to paint a comprehensive picture of the patient’s history, clinical course, and care plan. 

However, many EHRs are largely accessed by desktop or laptop computers, which presents a challenge for clinicians who are often “on the go” from room to room, or even unit to unit. Fortunately, smartphone use in the acute care environment has become more widespread, providing clinicians with easier access to clinical documentation and data at the point of care. 

Scaling an EHR platform to the mobile device allows clinicians to move efficiently through the hospital with access to the patient’s care plan and clinical documentation at their fingertips, reducing the physical and cognitive burden on clinicians. Pairing the EHR platform with the right clinical communication and collaboration application will allow you to further extend the EHR’s reach, potentially helping to mitigate clinician burnout and fatigue. In this blog, we will examine the optimal qualities your mobile communication platform should have to expand on the use of your organization’s EHR. 

Consolidate Your Communications 

There are plenty of clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) applications in the healthcare market, but the key to extending your EHR is leveraging a communication solution that prioritizes interoperability and key integrations.  

Mobile Heartbeat’s CC&C application can serve as a one stop shop for clinician alerting, consolidating and consuming alerts across technologies, including nurse call systems, telemetry systems, and the EHR.  

Mobilize your Care Team 

In practice, integrating your organization’s EHR with your clinical communication platform serves to promote care team collaboration by making dynamic data more accessible to users. At Mobile Heartbeat, we believe that critical information should be available to care team members in real-time, and we have specific integrations to support and enable that vision. 

 For instance, our Dynamic Care Team capability pulls real-time care team information so that clinicians have direct access to find and contact other members of a patient’s care team. We can consume this information from applications such as the EHR or the nurse call system – so as staff assignments are noted within the respective application, they are reflected instantly in the Dynamic Care Team. From there, Dynamic Care Team assignments can be used to drive high priority alerting from the EHR, ensuring that important information such as critical lab values are communicated to the right care team members. 

Innovating Interoperability 

At the forefront of this integration technology is an opportunity to make care team collaboration easier for clinicians. Mobile Heartbeat’s Banyan Platform, for example, supports seamless one-tap calling from the EHR. Launching communication capabilities like calling directly from the EHR enhances care coordination by connecting clinicians more quickly and easily than ever.  

It goes without saying that every healthcare organization’s infrastructure is different, utilizing a unique combination of technologies and applications to enhance their facility’s patient care objectives. Our InterApp Launch Points® API offers completely customizable links between our platform and other mission-critical tools, including the EHR, so clinicians can move seamlessly between whichever applications they need to provide optimal patient care. 

Configuration Support and Solutions 

Every healthcare organization has unique workflows; therefore, organizations need a flexible, collaborative platform where integrations can be tailored to accommodate and support specific needs across different teams, units, and facilities. Our dedicated team of solutions engineers and support specialists has optimized the process of configuring these integrations, easing the burden on hospital IT staff. 

After you’ve decided which integrations you’d like built out, our engineers will audit your infrastructure, ask questions designed to get specific and relevant information, and build out the integration based on your organization’s unique requirements. This white-glove service ensures your integrations fit your organization’s needs right from the start. 

At Mobile Heartbeat, we’ve taken a modular approach to our clinical communication platform that allows customers to turn capabilities on/off via feature flags, while the cloud foundation enables us to rapidly respond and partner with our customers on their ever- changing communication requirements and complex environments. Purpose-built EHR integrations with our CC&C platform can extend your EHR’s reach, advance care, and promote care team collaboration.  

Learn More 

Interested in learning more about how you can extend the functionality of your EHR through clinical communication and collaboration? Check out our eBook, “Go Multi-Purpose, Not Multi-Platform: How to Manage the Multi-Platform Dilemma With Fewer—and Better—Communication Tools“. For more information on high-impact integrations with mission-critical tools, contact one of our clinical mobility specialists or call us today at 781-238-0000.