From the December 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Mobilizing the team
Now the cardiologist has come to the ED and diagnoses Ms. Smith with an acute myocardial infarction. Given that it is 8 p.m., the cath lab team has to be mobilized as quickly as possible. Importantly, when the team is called, the right individuals need to be notified, and there must be acknowledgement that every member of the team has received the message and is coming in.
When a response team must be gathered, technology that facilitates the notification of the team can literally save lives. Urgent calls to teams of individuals, whether a code call in the hospital, or the call to the cath lab team or the call for a disaster readiness team, are more complicated than just overhead announcements, and can require notifying dozens, or even hundreds, of people. The individuals must be alerted on whatever mobile devices they carry, and the coordinator must be assured the team members have received the alert and are responding to the event. If staff are wasting time manually looking up who is on call or typing out texts to many different individuals, precious time is lost. In this situation, the cath team is automatically called in from home through a single click of a button on an automated notification tool, and Ms. Smith has a successful procedure.
As an ED or hospital administrator, are you satisfied with your communication processes? Have you eliminated all confusion from your communication to coordinate and manage care as quickly as possible? Can you audit the results for root cause analyses and for continuous process improvement? New enterprise health care communication technologies can make a big difference in improving the financial health of the ED, decreasing the frustrations of the staff, and most importantly, to Ms. Smith and every other patient who comes to your ED, optimizing quality and outcomes.
About the author: Dr. Andrew Mellin is chief medical officer at Spok. He has almost 20 years of experience in health information technology as a practicing physician and as an executive, leading physician adoption programs for new technologies and clinical solutions.Back to HCB News
