Improving Patient-Reported Outcomes with Communication

Few things are more frustrating than trying to deliver the best possible patient care while battling communication breakdowns. You’ve been there—waiting on a critical update, chasing down the right person for an answer, or dealing with unanswered messages that lead to dangerous delays. 

But why do these communication failures keep happening? Despite the best efforts of care teams, inefficiencies persist, creating ripple effects that impact patient safety, provider workflows, and hospital operations. The impact is so notable that one study claims nearly 30% of medical malpractice cases can be traced to poor communication.¹ The problem isn’t just inconvenient—it’s systemic. 

But merely discussing the symptoms of poor communication isn’t very helpful if we don’t dig into the root causes—the hidden issues baked into outdated scheduling workflows, siloed technologies, and inefficient processes.

To give this topic the attention it deserves, we sat down with Vanessa Ramirez, a Practice Consultant on our Professional Services team who worked as a Nurse Manager before joining PerfectServe. Her bedside experience underscores the importance of accurate and efficient communication—and the risks involved when these root causes contribute to communication breakdowns.

Key Takeaways 

• Care team communication isn’t just about efficiency—it directly influences patient outcomes and hospital success
• Faster response times and improved care coordination improve satisfaction, retention, and reimbursement rates, as well as overall care satisfaction levels
• Communication delays are often rooted in siloed technology and inefficient scheduling workflows 
• Communication efficiency can be improved with better tools and better schedules

Common Delays in Care Team Communication 

Delays caused by communication breakdowns are felt by the entire care team—not just clinicians.

Nurses, who are often the first point of contact for patient needs, are stuck wasting valuable time tracking down providers. Operators have to chase down the right schedules to make calls and execute patient transfers. Administrators struggle to find the correct phone or pager number for providers in different departments. 

For some, these struggles feel like unavoidable components of delivering patient care. Do any of these other common communication delays sound familiar? 

• Unanswered pages
• Urgent messages falling through the cracks
• Long response times for questions posed to colleagues
• Inaccurate schedules that make you call or page the wrong person
• Limited or nonexistent governance related to clinical communication 

While they may be common, these inefficiencies don’t just slow down care delivery workflows and increase stress for the care team. Their downstream effects can seriously impact patient care, outcomes, and satisfaction levels.

How Efficient Communication Improves Patient-reported Outcomes & Satisfaction 

One of the most common care team communication failures involves the miscommunication of patient symptoms and poor documentation of patient information.² If a patient’s symptoms aren’t accurately communicated to the entire care team responsible for a patient, it doesn’t just pose a threat to the patient’s satisfaction—depending on the symptom, it may pose a threat to their life.

In fact, as mentioned in the intro, the National Library of Medicine estimated that 27% of medical malpractice instances can be traced to communication failures.¹

If speed and accuracy are essential components of high-quality patient care, it makes sense that delays in communication would hinder patient outcomes and satisfaction levels. A few real-world examples of how delays in care can impact patient outcomes: 

• A nurse failed to inform the surgeon of a post-surgical patient’s abdominal pain and low red blood cell count, leading to undetected internal bleeding and the patient’s death.³
• A critical lab result was entered into the EHR, but without an escalation process or standardized notification system, the covering physician wasn’t alerted. As a result, the patient went without necessary intervention for longer than needed, leading to frustration for both the patient and their family.
• A radiologist reviewed a critical scan, but without an automated notification system, the surgeon remained unaware that results were available. Hours later, when they manually checked the chart, they realized the patient needed urgent surgery. In the meantime, the patient endured unnecessary pain and a prolonged ED stay.
• A cardiac patient had zero urine output six hours into the night shift, signaling the need for urgent intervention. After a bladder scan confirmed no urine, the nurse paged the on-call physician—only to wait 30 minutes for a response and learn they had contacted the wrong provider. With no accurate on-call schedule available, another hour passed before the correct physician was reached. By then, the patient had deteriorated to a code blue and required transfer to the cardiac ICU.

While not all delays lead to sentinel events or cause medical errors, any hindrance to high-quality care has the potential to negatively impact a patient’s care and/or satisfaction. 

As much as safety matters, from a business perspective, satisfaction rates can impact reimbursement rates, especially as the industry moves towards value-based care models.⁴ 

According to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Hospital Value-based Purchasing Program (VBP) “rewards acute care hospitals with incentive payments based on the quality of care they provide, rather than just the quantity of services they provide.”⁵ CMS established this program to tie Medicare payment to quality and cost measures, with scores being based on four measurement domains: clinical outcomes; safety; person and community engagement; and efficiency and cost reduction.⁶ 

So, how can better communication actually improve outcomes and satisfaction levels? Let’s look at a real-world example.  

At Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), critical lab results were delivered using a tedious manual process. When a result was ready, a lab tech would call the ordering provider, ask them to log into the EHR, and then review the results. This live verbal exchange was required to satisfy HSS’s internal protocols, so leaving a voice message with the results was not permitted. 

That means someone had to answer.

If the ordering physician wasn’t available to take the call, action to address the critical result was delayed. If a patient’s results were dire, there wasn’t any way to escalate the situation. And for lab techs, it’s not often they’ve only got one result for one patient to think about, so continuously following up with a provider can be a challenge among other important tasks that need attention. 

HSS knew something had to change to elevate their patient-reported outcomes and experiences. Using their clinical communication platform, they implemented an automated delivery process for critical lab results that drastically improved turnaround times. 

Now, results are instantly sent to the right provider with full patient context, allowing them to acknowledge the results and take responsibility in seconds. If unacknowledged, the system escalates the message, ensuring timely action and reducing patient risk. 

Since they modernized their lab result workflows, 80% of urgent messages at HSS are read in five minutes or less, and critical lab results experienced a 42% improvement in acknowledgment times. In fact, the quickest acknowledgement time for a critical result was measured at just seven seconds. Patient satisfaction scores also showed notable improvement. 

Root Cause of Healthcare Communication Delays 

Like in the story above, if the root cause of communication care delays can be fixed, then patient-reported outcomes are likely to improve. But what’s the root cause of the delays in the first place? 

Inaccurate schedules—often the result of poor scheduling workflows—lead to a host of issues, including delayed messages, misrouted calls, and missed communications that can disrupt patient care.

Another root cause of communication delays is siloed communication channels. Patient care is largely managed in the EHR, but if a nurse needs to send another care team member a message about a patient’s lab results, she’s using her own cell phone. To check who to send the message to, she’s opening another program to check an outdated schedule. To make sure the provider’s number is correct, she’s searching for that sticky note she got two days ago, buried somewhere at the nurses’ station.  

These silos create distraction and frustrations, which in turn delays patient care.

Eliminating Delays in the Healthcare Operator Console

Healthcare call center software operators rely on the accuracy of schedules because they need clear, efficient communication pathways to route calls and transfer patients. 

If an operator is looking at an outdated Excel shift schedule, there’s no way to know if the schedule is accurate. What happens if they route an inbound call to the on-call clinician listed on the schedule, but that clinician has swapped with another provider? 

This communication delay can be eliminated by having accurate scheduling workflows in place, allowing operators to:  

• Reliably route calls to the correct clinicians
• See a single, real-time view of the schedule across all departments and locations
• Eliminate the need for paper-based (or otherwise rudimentary) schedules

Eliminating Delays in Healthcare Clinics and Practices

Even for clinics or smaller practices, communication inefficiencies disrupt the quality of care. Especially after hours, routing urgent and non-urgent messages to the correct provider can make or break a patient’s experience. It can also make or break a provider’s time off!  

Here are two examples: 

Patient Experience 

A patient calls in at 12 AM to request a prescription refill. The patient listens to the practice’s voicemail prompts and is instructed to leave a message. The recording says their call will be returned at 8 AM the next day. The patient believes the refill is urgent and wants to speak to the doctor on call. 

When they press 0 to speak to the on-call clinician, no one picks up. This frustrates the patient immensely, and if the experience is repeated, the patient may choose to seek care from another clinic in the future. 

Patient Outcome 

A patient wakes up at midnight with intense stomach pain. Worried, they call their clinic’s answering service and press 0 to reach the on-call clinician. The phone rings endlessly before going to voicemail. 

Frustrated and uncertain, the patient leaves a message and waits. As the pain worsens over the next few hours, they call again—only to face the same voicemail response. With no other option, they head to the ER. 

There, they are diagnosed with appendicitis and rushed into surgery. Had they been able to reach the on-call clinician, they might have received antibiotics earlier, potentially avoiding the need for surgery altogether. 

Both of these situations could be avoided with accurate physician scheduling software and a modern medical answering service.

How to Boost Care Team Communication to Improve Patient-Reported Outcomes 

Efficient healthcare communication isn’t as easy as buying communication technology and making it available to your care team. Optimization requires a careful and concerted strategy, and using a patient-centric approach means considering all stakeholders in the communication process.

Here are some questions to ask to get started:  

1. How do nurses and doctors communicate at your organization?
2. Are personal devices used to share patient information?
3. What is the makeup of the support staff on your team?
4. What is the size and care scope of your organization?
5. What other IT solutions does your organization utilize?
6. Are there any existing communication protocols in place that can be boosted or adjusted? 

Successfully improving care team communication workflows requires strong central governance to guide the transition. When implemented effectively, these workflows become intuitive, ensuring both new and existing team members can quickly adapt and maintain seamless coordination. 

Sources:

1. Poor communication by health care professionals may lead to life-threatening complications: examples from two case reports. National Library of Medicine: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6694717/.
2. Effects of Poor Communication in Healthcare. The HIPAA Journal: https://www.hipaajournal.com/effects-of-poor-communication-in-healthcare/
3. Effects of Poor Communication in Healthcare. The HIPAA Journal: https://www.hipaajournal.com/effects-of-poor-communication-in-healthcare/
4. Maximizing Healthcare Reimbursement Through Higher Patient Satisfaction Scores. Relias: https://www.relias.com/blog/healthcare-reimbursement-patient-satisfaction-scores
5. Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/quality/initiatives/hospital-quality-initiative/hospital-value-based-purchasing
6. CMS will pay $1.9 billion to hospitals in value-based payments for inpatient care. Healthcare Finance: https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/cms-will-pay-19-billion-hospitals-value-based-payments-inpatient-care