PerfectServe Stands in the Fight Against Racism and Injustice

The murder of George Floyd on May 25—and the events that have transpired since then—requires deliberate introspection about the state of affairs in our country and beyond. These events are of deep concern to me, our employees, our families, our friends, and our communities.

The Black community is in pain, and positive change is a necessity. PerfectServe stands in the fight against racism and injustice. We stand to overcome the challenges that we face and use our voices to demand that ignorance and inequity come to an end.

It’s important for me to reassert that PerfectServe has zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind. We pride ourselves on creating a work environment that is equally welcoming to people of all races, genders, religions, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and nationalities.

In this moment, actions speak louder than words. We’re committed to evaluating our processes and standards—with help and input from people inside and outside the company—to ensure that diversity and inclusion play a larger role in PerfectServe’s culture moving forward. Change doesn’t happen overnight, but these initiatives will make us a stronger company and a better member of the community in the end.

This is only the beginning. We are confronted with daunting social challenges, and there isn’t a silver bullet. We can all do better, and PerfectServe is committed to being part of the solution.

Guillaume Castel
CEO, PerfectServe

National Nurses Week 2020

Annual celebration of nurses takes on special meaning during COVID-19 pandemic.

This week, businesses around the country, from Dunkin’ to Adidas to Chipotle to H&R Block, are clamoring to offer freebies and discounts for nurses to celebrate National Nurses Week 2020. Though it’s never a bad time to highlight the incredible work nurses do as vital members of care teams in healthcare organizations across the country, this year’s celebration feels especially poignant as the country (and much of the world) is still reeling from the effects of COVID-19.

PerfectServe is fortunate to have nurses on staff, including team members who still practice part-time today and others who transitioned into information technology full-time after spending years in nursing careers. With this valuable perspective in-house, we asked a few of these current and former nurses to share their thoughts about how COVID-19 has changed the role of a nurse, and which we’ll share throughout the rest of the week.

Julie Mills, RN, BSN, MBA

With 18 years of experience as a nurse, Julie has worked in many capacities sharing her clinical expertise, including in the US Air Force as a Unit Coordinator. Currently, Julie is a Senior Clinical Solutions Executive at PerfectServe, where she serves as a clinical advisor to teams across the company. She also practices at the University of Tennessee Medical Center and is pursuing her Doctor of Nursing Practice in Healthcare Administration degree at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Nurses are the listening ear, the conversationalist, and the hand holder.

“I’ve been a nurse for 18 years and currently practice a few days every month at an academic medical center that also serves as the region’s only Level I Trauma Center. COVID-19 brings a heightened sense of awareness to all that we do—checking temps when you walk in the door, wearing masks, and being mindful of supplies. Families aren’t allowed to visit, so they’re calling us more for updates about their loved ones, and the emotional support we provide becomes more critical to the patient.

Nurses have always been the primary patient caregiver at the bedside, but in a crisis, their role is expanded. Without families at the bedside, the nurse is the all day, everyday support system. Beyond providing care, nurses also step up to be the listening ear, the conversationalist and the hand holder. In rapidly changing clinical situations, the nurse’s clinical acumen and intuition are essential to managing care and communications with other team members.”

Mary Piepenbrink, RN, BSN, MBA

With more than 25 years of experience in the healthcare industry, Mary has served both as a nurse and a leader in information technology software and service solutions. Currently, she is the Vice President of Sales, Lightning Bolt, where she supports caregivers and helps hospitals and health systems improve their operations, reduce costs, and counteract provider burnout.

COVID-19: An Unprecedented Situation for Nurses

“This is unprecedented for most nurses; most do not have experience beyond routine infection prevention standards and practices. Some specialists mask, gown, and glove up when they care for known infectious patients, but typically that is a careful, thoughtful, measured approach. With COVID-19, nurses are doing this in long stretches and seeing patients rapid-fire. Nurses aren’t just concerned about the hard mental and physical work caring for patients they they normally do—they are fearful about transmission to other patients, concerned about the health of their coworkers, and of course have enormous stress about bringing the virus home to their families. As they do what they do best—triage, adapt, multitask, worry—I can’t but help wonder what effect this will have on our profession long term. I check in on my clinician friends—nurses, doctors, pharmacists—not just where I live, but in other more affected cities, to try and support them by listening and providing encouragement. Many of us feel helpless to do more.”

Mark Denny, BSN

Currently a Clinical Consultant at PerfectServe, Mark assists healthcare organizations as they implement PerfectServe’s Clinical Communication & Collaboration solutions. Mark worked in clinical informatics before transitioning to healthcare IT consulting.

Much-Needed Recognition for Nurses

“The presence of a nurse has a critical impact in any clinical setting, but even more so at this time. Right now, nurses are truly practicing the emergency alert responses they are taught and hope to never use. Nurses in general are frequently exposed to pathogens, bugs, volatile patient situations, staff shortages, and endless documentation, all the while going unnoticed for their work on a day to day basis. This crisis has brought to light many of the dangerous situations nurses willingly walk into every day, and they are now receiving the recognition they deserve. My work doesn’t take me to the bedside anymore, but my contributions make it easier for nursing staff to communicate with their co-workers and on-call physicians while making a positive impact on patient care.”

Celebrating National Nurses Week

For over 20 years, PerfectServe has worked hand-in-hand with nurses to improve care delivery workflows at hospitals and practices across the country. In fact, PerfectServe might not exist if it hadn’t been for the wife of founder Terry Edwards. Penny Edwards was a nurse handling inbound communication for a private practice, and her frustrations with the antiquated process for fielding patient messages and coordinating responses with the physician are what led Terry to devise a more modern after-hours answering service solution.

From those beginnings, PerfectServe has grown to serve healthcare delivery organizations of all shapes and sizes, and one thing that has never changed is the courage and dedication we witness every day from the nurses we serve. Happy National Nurses Week, and thank you for being the backbone of care delivery in communities throughout the United States, especially in times of crisis.

3 Ways to Save Nurses’ Time With Better Communication

Nurses play a central role in providing patient-centered, cost-effective care. They are responsible for care coordination and communication with each patient’s family members, as well as a growing care team of physicians and specialists, ancillary staff, and care coordinators. In addition to nurses’ growing list of daily nonclinical tasks, inefficient care coordination workflows prevent them from working to the top of their licensure.

A 2018 time and motion study revealed that in four hours, nurses spent around 32 minutes communicating with patients and family and 51 minutes communicating and coordinating care with members of the care team¹—fully 34.6% of nurses’ time each day. Technology aimed at improving nurse workflows has often contributed to their frustration by adding siloed, task-specific “solutions” to their workload.

Let’s talk about the alternative. Keep reading to learn three ways clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) technology can help healthcare organizations empower their nurses to work at the top of their license to drive patient-centered care for optimal outcomes.

Reduce Communication Cycle Times

Communication workflows are often cumbersome, requiring nurses to reference several systems and/or paper on-call schedules to page, call, and relay information through office staff … and then wait for the intended recipient to call back. This error-prone process causes care delays and requires a full restart when a provider is unavailable for any reason.

An improved communication strategy built around an integrated solution like PerfectServe can reduce average response times from 45 minutes to 20 minutes or less.² Here are some key capabilities that can make it easy for nurses to find the right physician at the right time:

• One unified directory to find and contact clinicians by name, role, and/or on-call status (e.g. “cardiologist on call”), or to send messages to the whole patient care team at the touch of a button.
• Built in physician contact preferences to ensure communication is delivered via the preferred/frequently checked method.
• Read receipts and smart escalation to ensure messages are read, acknowledged, and acted upon in a timely manner.
• Message history and EHR integration for quick context.

Faster communication leads to safer, quicker, and higher quality care.

Integrate Alerts and Critical Result Notifications

Alarms, alerts, and other notifications continue to be named among the top 10 health technology hazards for 2020,³ impacting patient satisfaction and contributing to alarm fatigue.

In a 2015 study, nurses reported that only 52% of bed calls required nursing care, while others could be answered by support staff.⁴ Constant interruptions reduce care efficiency and require nurses to make multiple unnecessary trips to patient rooms. While nurses are inundated with too many alerts, they are not adequately alerted of critical results and orders, requiring them to repeatedly check the EHR for updates.

Centralizing alerts and communication across multiple systems, including the EHR and nurse call system, can eliminate noise, add context to alert notifications, and call attention to critical alerts by allowing:

• Delivery of alerts to mobile devices, where nurses can accept, escalate, or call back to speak with the patient.
• Push notification of critical results (lab or radiology) or physician orders to speed up time to care.
• Routing of nonclinical alerts to patient care techs or nursing assistants.
• Workflow rules to help ensure that only critical alarms disrupt normal workflows and are differentiated with a distinct alert tone.
• Clinical surveillance to send push alerts for sepsis, respiratory deterioration, organ failure, etc.
• Routing of “leads off” alarms to only alert the nurse assigned to that specific patient, set to escalate to the charge nurse if the assigned nurse does not respond within a predetermined time frame, eliminating an audible, ward-wide alert.

Simplify Patient Engagement

Nurses are tasked with keeping family members up to date on patient status, sharing care instructions, arranging discharge, and following up with patients and their families after discharge. As nurses invest increasing amounts of time in patient and family engagement activities, they become more confined to the nurses’ station and less available at the patient bedside.

Post-discharge patient engagement often relies heavily on phone communication, with declining impact due to phone tag and low voicemail retrieval rates. On the other hand, secure texting with patients and families allows health systems to automate more effective outreach in order to:

• Share care instructions, arrange discharge, and answer questions.
• Route inbound messages to the call center, rather than the nurse, for triage.
• Automate patient outreach, such as surveys, post-discharge instructions (tailored to the patient profile), and referrals.
• Support two-way communication and allow individuals to respond to patients as needed, leveraging the expertise of nurse assistants, call agents, and more.

Start Saving Nurses’ Time

PerfectServe’s CC&C solution with patient engagement capabilities helps streamline nurse workflows, reduce care delays, improve patient safety, and boost patient satisfaction. To learn more, contact us or click below.

PerfectServe’s Solution for Nurses

Prevent Patient Leakage With In-Network Referrals

Healthcare leaders must reduce patient leakage by improving clinical communication throughout the referral process to support value-based care and drive better patient and population health outcomes.

Large healthcare networks were created to broaden patient access to connected providers and facilities. In-network referrals are a key aspect of maintaining continuity of care across hospitals, primary care facilities, outpatient facilities, and ancillary services to support better patient outcomes.

What is patient leakage?

Patient leakage, also known as referral leakage and patient referral leakage, describes when a patient seeks or obtains healthcare services outside the hospital network. Unfortunately, when patients go outside the network for care, significant problems can occur.

Problems Caused by Patient Leakage

1. The patient loses care continuity, often resulting in a frustrating patient experience and suboptimal patient health outcomes.
2. The health system loses revenue and visibility into the patient’s healthcare journey, which is essential for tracking patient progress and administering future treatment.
3. The out-of-network specialist may not have full access to the patient’s medical records and history to support proper treatment.
4. With out-of-network referrals, inefficiencies in the referral process can result in denied referrals, delays in patient diagnosis or care, duplicate testing, and reduced continuity of care.¹

One study found that approximately 70% of primary care providers (PCPs) report sending patient history and reason for referral, but less than 35% of specialists report receiving that information.²

The Cost of Patient Leakage

Every year, more than a third of patients in the US are referred to a specialist. Healthcare executives report the following:

• 43% are losing 10% or more of annual revenue to patient leakage.
• 19% are losing up to 20% of annual revenue.
• 20% don’t understand where or why patient leakage occurs.³

20% percent of malpractice claims for missed or delayed diagnoses involved communication deficits in handoffs.³

What causes patient leakage?

Patient leakage occurs for a variety of reasons, but it happens most frequently when physicians issue out-of-network referrals. A survey of 200 physicians across the US revealed that a significant contributor to out-of-network referrals is the lack of access to detailed information about in-network providers.

91-96% of physicians say details including a provider’s general specialty, subspecialty, specific area of clinical focus, and availability to see a patient in a timely manner are highly important to inform referrals. But only 57-63% of respondents report having access to these details.⁴

Healthcare organizations can reduce business losses from out-of-network referrals and improve care outcomes by making it easier to find and hand off care to in-network care providers.

Patient Satisfaction Contributes to Patient Leakage

Another cause of patient leakage is a patient’s choice to go outside the healthcare network, which could be caused by a lack of information about in-network options or problems with the patient experience. A patient may leave with an in-network referral, but choose a competing facility instead.

Why? Sometimes, the patient is dissatisfied with their care. Other times, patients conduct their own research and choose a competing facility without knowing how the choice might impact the coordination of their care.

How to Reduce Patient Leakage

To reduce patient leakage, healthcare organizations need to support in-network referrals by enhancing transparency and simplifying the referral process. Make sure the right information is accessible to physicians looking for an in-network specialist for a patient referral. Use a system that delivers the referral to the right provider at the right time, with built-in escalation to ensure a timely response.

A clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) solution can help if it offers:

Clinician Collaboration

• Unified Directory: Referring physicians can easily look up any in-network clinician by name, role, or specialty. Search “cardiologist” to see a list of in-network cardiologists and further refine the list by hospital or healthcare facility to best support patients.
• Safe Patient Handoff: Referring PCPs or hospital physicians can perform a safe handoff to seamlessly share patient history and clinical notes with the specialist.
• Care Coordination: Support ongoing communication among the complete care team—including the referring physician and the specialist—with HIPAA-compliant messaging to foster team-based decision making and close the loop on patient care.

Patient Communication

• Patient Education: Ongoing communication with patients and their family members can be automated and delivered via text message to boost engagement and help patients understand the importance of in-network referrals.
• Patient Referral Follow-Up: Help increase the completion rate of referrals by sending a text to the patient after treatment or discharge to connect them with an in-network provider so they can schedule an appointment.
• Patient Satisfaction Surveys: Sending links to satisfaction surveys after each healthcare encounter can help you spot and potentially resolve issues that would otherwise impact patient loyalty and HCAHPS scores.

Streamline Patient Referrals to Reduce Patient Leakage

Healthcare networks can propel value-based care and reduce patient leakage with effective clinical collaboration and patient engagement solutions. To learn more about how patient and family engagement supports value-based care initiatives, read the white paper.

Get the White Paper