PerfectServe’s Clinical Collaboration Solution Reduces Care Team Toil

To meet patients’ rising expectations and the growing demand for value-based care, healthcare organizations must support care team members at every turn. Limiting their stress and frustration in daily tasks can go a long way to reduce feelings of burnout and costly turnover.

But, cumbersome workflows often hinder clinicians’ performance and make a difficult job even harder. Inefficiencies limit their satisfaction by taking up time that would otherwise be spent on patient care, which is their most important job—the job they do best. Over time, this promotes burnout and even lower satisfaction levels in a cycle that can lead to less-than-optimal patient care.

This has all been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has added even more stress and uncertainty to clinicians’ daily lives. As a result, more clinicians than ever are leaving the profession entirely.

Improved Communication at Hospital for Special Surgery

In 2019, Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS)—America’s premier academic medical center focused on musculoskeletal health—decided to improve their clinical communication workflows. The processes they had in place were effective but time consuming, and the inefficient or suboptimal workflows were a drag on care team productivity and morale.

With 3,500 users spread across 175 clinic locations going in and out of surgery and using a mix of owned and shared devices, fast and effective communication wasn’t always possible. HSS wanted to make communication more efficient and less frustrating for care team members.

Since PerfectServe’s automated answering service was already successfully deployed in HSS’s owned clinics, the organization decided to expand the system footprint to their acute care setting by implementing PerfectServe’s enterprise Clinical Collaboration solution. After implementation, results were carefully monitored and reported in two primary categories: provider satisfaction and nurse satisfaction.

Improved Physician Satisfaction

Before PerfectServe, contacting another care team member meant physicians had to log in to the HSS intranet, search for the correct pager number, send the page, and then wait for a response. To put it simply, efficiency isn’t guaranteed when a process has this many manual steps.

But with PerfectServe, all a user needs to know is the name—or perhaps the role—of the person they want to contact (e.g., Sports Attending On Call). PerfectServes’s Dynamic Intelligent Routing® handles everything else automatically, providing almost instant communication between care team members.

Dynamic Intelligent Routing allows physicians to quickly contact the right clinician at the right time by accounting for multiple variables like date, time, service line, urgency, and more. Physicians no longer waste time sifting through directories and call schedules looking for pager numbers—they only need to follow PerfectServe’s simple guided workflows.

Each month, PerfectServe now seamlessly and dynamically references 1,819 users, 5,915 schedules, 7,060 notification rules, 3,069 contact rules, and 6,863 routing rules to deliver all clinical communications quickly and accurately—all while freeing up physicians to focus more on patient care.

Improved Physician Satisfaction

Before PerfectServe, contacting another care team member meant physicians had to log in to the HSS intranet, search for the correct pager number, send the page, and then wait for a response. To put it simply, efficiency isn’t guaranteed when a process has this many manual steps.

Improved Nurse Satisfaction

By using the PerfectServe app on their smartphones, nurses can reduce the number of devices and hardware in their toolbelt. At HSS, they use it primarily for texting since that’s less intrusive than initiating a phone call, but they also use it for sharing photographs securely. In any given month, HSS nurses send several hundred messages with attachments—predominantly images—from shared iPhones.

Nurses at HSS still utilize workstations on wheels (WOWs), but because PerfectServe is embedded directly within the EHR environment, they can send messages without jumping between applications. In terms of real-world results, another large hospital that uses PerfectServe’s EHR embedded messaging functionality has seen a 322% decrease in the time required for nurses to initiate communication.

Results

The functionalities of PerfectServe allowed HSS to eliminate more than 1,700 pagers. Before, when pages were received, there was no way to triage them based on the level of urgency. But now, clinicians can prioritize their responsibilities at any given moment with urgency designations included with every message. A page also keeps the sender in the dark about delivery status. With PerfectServe, it’s easy to see if a message has been delivered and read—nothing falls through the cracks.

Pager replacement also helped HSS realize a cost savings of over $200,000 the first year and will prevent another $80,000 from being spent every year moving forward (attributed to the recurring costs of pager maintenance and upkeep).

HSS now uses PerfectServe as the single source of truth for on-call schedules. The platform enables clinicians to quickly update their availability and preferences, and changes are visible to all users in real time. This allows communications to be routed according to the up-to-date schedule being referenced. Out of roughly 10,000 unique communications between HSS nurses and physicians assistants each month, the average time for message acknowledgment is just 3.3 minutes. If messages weren’t being routed quickly and correctly, this communication cycle time would surely increase.

Reducing or eliminating the friction that makes it difficult for care team members to do their jobs is a critical part of improving their overall satisfaction. Manual workflows that lead to costly delays have been baked into care delivery for far too long. But the good news is that smart technology can help—and it already exists today.

Reach out to us to learn more about how PerfectServe can improve your care teams’ satisfaction to reduce costly burnout and turnover. You can also learn more about the results HSS has seen with PerfectServe by downloading the full case study.