News Releases
Nurses Welcome Single-Call Physician-Contact Network
Convenient Physician Access And Nurse Satisfaction Linked, CNO Says
July 17, 2009
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The problem was an all-too-common one: “‘If it’s Wednesday and it’s raining, call my office.’ ‘If it’s sunny, call my cell.’ ‘Don’t ever call me at home in the evening because it disturbs my sleeping baby.’ ‘Always call my home phone, because I don’t keep my pager with me.’ ‘Use my pager; I always keep it by my bed.’”
Nurses and switchboard operators whose job it was to track down physicians were faced with 250 separate sets of just such call preferences – one for each physician in the hospital – according to Cynthia Pearsall, RN, vice president and chief nursing officer of Fairfield Medical Center in Lancaster, Ohio.
And under each idiosyncratic scenario, mistakes, miscommunication – and non-communication – were inevitable, frustrating both nurses and physicians, Pearsall said.
Direct, Single-Number Access To Every Staff Physician
With PerfectServe, all of those algorithms, expressing the needs and desires of each and every doctor on staff, don’t go away. PerfectServe actually keeps track of them in its network, so nurses don’t have to.
With PerfectServe, calls are routed in precisely the way the physicians wish – 24 hours a day. “With PerfectServe, our nurses just press a button, then key in a few numbers corresponding with the physician’s name, and they’re able to have direct access to the physician,” Pearsall said. “Most times, this means either they’re routed straight through to the physician’s cell, or they leave a voicemail which the physician will listen to personally.”
The efficiencies PerfectServe offers are impressive. Pearsall points to a study conducted by a University of Colorado research team headed by Dr. John Westfall, in which physician contact at Fairfield Medical Center was compared to three other hospitals that did not use PerfectServe. Research found that in a hospital using PerfectServe:
• Nurses experienced 81 percent fewer repeat phone calls to physicians.
• ICU-to-physician contact cycle times were more than 50 percent quicker.
• Nurses completed 10 times more physician contacts in two minutes or less.
“The key to PerfectServe is that it gives both nurses and physicians exactly what they need out of the contact process,” Pearsall said.
The Needs Of Both Nurses and Physicians Are Accommodated
“Physicians have nearly endless flexibility. They can carry any contact device, since PerfectServe accommodates every technology platform. And they’re no longer tied down to any one phone or location. They can change their protocols at will, whenever they wish, or they can program in automatic changes in advance based on their schedule.
“And nurses are able to contact every staff physician quickly and conveniently, by dialing a single, unchanging phone number,” Pearsall said. “Which means that nurses are able to dispense with the lists of several phone numbers per physician and the always-outdated call schedules. PerfectServe tracks all that information, so nurses are able to determine who’s on call – and contact the right doctor – just by making a single phone call.”
Nurse Job Satisfaction Improved
One of the strongest reasons for job discontent among nurses is the necessity to complete non-patient-care-related tasks, according to a Health Affairs study of nurses in the U.S., Canada, England, Scotland and Germany. “When I arrived at Fairfield Medical Center in 2001, one of the first and biggest challenges I faced was the nursing staff’s inability to contact physicians in a timely, convenient manner,” Pearsall said.
“In fact I remember being given a four-inch thick book of individual physician contact preferences for our team of 250 physicians,” Pearsall said. “This document included office numbers, pager numbers, cell and home phone numbers, in additional to a wide range of individualized instructions.
“PerfectServe allowed us to dispense with all of that. Lost time due to repeated phone calls, etc., has been severely reduced – by more than two-thirds, research suggests, and my experience would back that number up,” she said.
Patient Safety Depends On Quality Communication
“In our business, it’s understood that efficient nurse-physician communication is essential to patient outcomes. In fact, in a study from 1995 to 2004, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations found communication breakdown to be the number one underlying factor behind all sentinel events,” Pearsall said.
“More timely, more accurate, more reliable communications can only enhance patient safety,” Pearsall said.
Has anyone PerfectServe’d the physician yet?
“I knew we had hit a home run when nurses began using the name of the system as a verb meaning to contact the physician,” Pearsall said.
“Now, PerfectServe has become like the wallpaper – it’s just a part of the way we do our jobs. Our nurses barely think about it any more.
“As the Florence Nightingale Pledge says, our job is to partner with the physician in patient care. With closer, more efficient, more reliable communication linking us together, nurses here at Fairfield feel more like true partners.”
The PerfectServe physician-contact network automatically routes calls and messages to the right doctor, at the right time, in the precise way each physician wishes to be reached. Communication occurs faster, with greater efficiency and safety, because PerfectServe assembles and maintains the entire communications workflow and contact preferences for every medical staff physician, for every moment of every day. The company currently serves over 12,500 physicians in 150 markets across the U.S. For more information, visit www.perfectserve.com.