This is the third in a series of blogs that define the value hierarchy for hospitals implementing a Clinical Communications and Collaboration (CC&C) solution. The first blog Metcalfe’s Law and Plans Coming Together discussed the need for an enterprise CC&C platform in order to best support all clinicians and ancillary staff across the facility. Our second blog, It’s About the Number of Users, Not the Number of Hospitals, focused on the need to drive adoption of the enterprise platform among all potential users in the facility, not just certain roles or departments. These two factors form the basis for identifying and unlocking the true value of CC&C platforms.

Smoother Workflows:
Once your hospital has implemented an enterprise CC&C platform and enabled true enterprise-wide user adoption, you can understand existing workflows in new ways by understanding who communicates with whom. This discovery process identifies inefficiencies, creating opportunities to streamline current workflows and develop new workflows you might not have known existed.

Greater Efficiency:
The workflow discovery provided by the Mobile Heartbeat platform helps your hospital improve the way your staff and clinicians communicate and coordinate tasks. Behavior is the true indicator of how a workflow functions. Someone may say or think that they are doing a task or process in one specific way, but the data provided by the MH platform shows they are doing it another way. For example, our data shows the importance of ancillary staff in overall workflow. Pharmacy, lab techs, transport, and EVS all play roles at key points in the care of a patient. Understanding workflow blockages and gaps, and then using the MH-CURE platform to streamline those workflows leads to greater efficiency.

Let’s look at the efficiency of patient movement, an important metric in hospitals. There are the “checkpoints” in a patient’s journey, one of which is the ED to the admissions process. A patient is assessed in the ED, where the decision is made to admit the patient. The hospital must find a bed and move the patient to that bed to initiate care. By providing hospitals with the data to understand what happens during that process, our customers have achieved a 25 percent reduction in the total time for that process. With discharges, there’s a 10 to 15 percent time reduction. These time reductions improve the patient experience while providing tremendous monetary value.

Improving Patient Outcomes:
Most importantly, when processes move more quickly and smoothly, no one benefits more than the patients because clinicians can be more responsive and attentive. We’re seeing data that shows that the quality of care has improved, and that’s what it’s all about. We’ve seen the time for a stroke patient to go from examination to a CT scan and to medication reduced by 40 percent. A significant time reduction like that is very meaningful with life-threatening situations where the time to intervention is critical. Another use case we are seeing relates to sepsis. Speed is essential when risk of sepsis is identified. Our CC&C platform enables automated messages to be directed to the specific care team member for that patient, saving time, and ultimately lives.

It’s an exciting time and we’re just getting started. Maximizing these benefits is dependent on a true CC&C enterprise platform with enterprise adoption. Once you have that, the opportunities for workflow and patient outcomes are limitless.