The role of secure communications in your clinical integration strategy

If you could take one solution with you on your journey to clinical integration, what would it be?

Clinical integration is the unification of healthcare data, services and coordination across acute, outpatient and post-acute care. It portrays an environment where waste and inefficiency are all but eliminated from healthcare communications, costs decrease and care improves. It’s the future of medicine.

You wouldn’t be far off course if your first thought was to rely heavily on the EHR to support your clinical integration strategy. While the EHR is a valuable tool for sharing patient information within hospital systems and broader care networks, it lacks a fundamental quality that bridges the gaps between Meaningful Use and true clinical integration.

Fully realized clinical integration can only occur when the barriers of communication have been broken down, and interdisciplinary clinicians can accurately and reliably coordinate care in real time across organizational and geographical boundaries. As with most things related to healthcare communication and the sharing of information across disparate networks, securing those communications has been and will continue to be a primary focus for healthcare IT leaders. In an environment where healthcare organizations are driving toward an end-goal of clinical integration, enabling secure communications alone just isn’t enough.

To achieve clinical integration, clinicians need a solution that enables immediate, accurate, reliable and secure communications.

Immediacy in healthcare communication

Real-time communication is a crucial element of delivering high-value care. In the most critical emergencies, every second counts. The time that clinicians waste identifying the right on-call care team member to contact, and then trying to reach that person, can quite literally be the difference between life and death. Even in non-emergent situations, early detection and treatment are well-known effective preventers of worsening conditions.

Yet it’s all too common for inefficient and broken communication workflows to create time-consuming hurdles for clinicians to clear—sometimes even to just begin the conversation.

Clinically integrated settings approach clinician-to-clinician communication with a sense of real-time urgency. That’s not to say that every message should be sent with an emergency status, just that the process of identifying the provider you need to connect to and the delivery of that message should be seamless and immediate.

Reaching the right care team member on the first attempt should be an important metric for all hospital systems. To keep performance numbers high in this area, you must ensure clinicians always know exactly whom to contact for any given medical issue.

However, most clinicians today initiate time-sensitive contact to the broader care team by thumbing through a lengthy paper-based on-call schedule, making a call, and then waiting to receive a response.

Real-time clinical communication and collaboration tools immediately deliver secure communications, and even allow the clinician initiating the communication to see in real time when messages are delivered and read.

Contact accuracy

Reaching providers on the first attempt is important, but it’s just as important to reach the right provider—the one who can act on the medical issue at that moment—via his or her preferred method of contact.

It’s not uncommon for providers to have a different preferred contact medium for every variance of their schedule. And it’s not uncommon for those schedules to change at a moment’s notice. Yet many hospitals, in both small and large systems, only print the schedule and patient assignment lists once per day.

Clinicians in this setting have no way of knowing if they are accurately reaching out to the right providers via the right contact method. Manually producing a list of whom to contact and how is a process riddled with opportunity for inefficiency and inaccuracy.

Dynamic Intelligent Routing™ eliminates those opportunities for communication breakdown. A distinct capability of PerfectServe, Dynamic Intelligent Routing analyzes workflows, call schedules and contact preferences, enabling clinicians to reach the right person at the right time with just the tap of a button.

Reliable communication workflows

If your clinicians depend on inaccurate call schedules or outdated, cumbersome processes to drive clinical communications, your communication workflow isn’t reliable.

When clinicians can immediately contact the care team member they need via that provider’s preferred contact method, communication workflows become reliable and trustworthy, which leads to high adoption and improved patient care, no matter the care setting.

From improved care coordination to reduced costs

Inefficient communication workflows not only interfere with the realization of clinical integration, but also they inflate healthcare costs. For example, if a radiologist identifies a critical result in an outpatient test, the radiologist needs to contact the patient’s PCP so action can be taken right away. If the communication is not immediate, accurate or reliable, the process breaks down and the delay could result in medical complications for the patient that end up costing more to treat.

Moving a patient safely through the admissions, treatment, discharge and post-acute care processes requires a tremendous amount of coordination, good communication and a sound clinical integration strategy. The tools you use to support that communication and collaboration will play an important role in your success.

See how an innovative partner rated Best in KLAS for Clinical Communications after four consecutive years leading the category can help ensure you’ve got the right solutions working for you.

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Safeguarding security: 4 tactics for secure clinical communication and collaboration

I had the honor of speaking at the 2016 Becker’s Hospital Review Annual CIO/HIT + Revenue Cycle Summit, discussing the elements needed to truly secure clinical communications with some of the best minds in the healthcare world. With a number of recent high profile news stories announcing ransomware attacks in hospitals and health systems, security and the ability to secure clinical information is top of mind for many.

Those who oversee organizational data and IT systems recognize the importance of securing communication channels containing ePHI as they build a unified communications strategy. While security and regulatory mandates are essential elements of a clinical communication strategy, to create a truly successful strategy, the needs of those who provide care: physicians, nurses, therapists and others on the care team – in any setting – at any time – must be addressed flawlessly and securely.

To do so, there a few tactics to keep in mind:

Understand what the HIPAA Security Rule actually states

There’s been a lot of confusion in the industry when it comes to HIPAA compliance and communication. I often notice that many organizations think this is all about secure text messaging, which is incomplete. The Security Rule never speaks to a particular technology or communications modality, application or device. It is technology neutral.

HIPAA compliance is about the system of physical, administrative and technical safeguards that your organization puts in place to to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of all ePHI it creates, receives, maintains or transmits. Because of this, there is no such thing as a HIPAA-compliant app.

Understand care team dynamics

Care team members are mobile and they employ workflows to receive communication based upon situational variables such as origin, purpose, urgency, day, time, call schedules, patient and more. The variables determine who should be contacted and how to do so for every communications event.

For this reason, third parties (hospital switchboards and answering services) and disparate technologies are used in organizations’ clinical communication processes. Understanding this variety of technologies and actors is key to accurately assessing your organization’s compliance risk. And, coming up with strategies to effectively address that risk is key.

Secure text messaging is essential, but it’s not sufficient

While secure messaging is an essential component of your overall strategy, it’s not sufficient because:

it requires the sender to always know who it is they need to reach—by name.
it requires the recipient to always be available to other care team members 24/7.

These requirements are inconsistent with the complexity inherent in communication workflows that enable time-sensitive care delivery processes, because they don’t address the situational variables I described above.

Secure messaging is only one piece of what should be a much larger communications strategy—one that should address clinician workflows and multi-modal communications channels for all care team members.

Your goal should be to enable more effective care team collaboration

Organizations often focus on achieving HIPAA-compliance. This is a flawed objective. The focus should be on achieving more effective care team collaboration. If this is done effectively, achieving HIPAA-compliance will come along for the ride.

Six essential capabilities

An effective secure clinical communications and collaboration strategy will include the following six elements.

It will facilitate communication-driven workflows that enable time-sensitive care delivery processes. An example of a communications-driven workflow is stroke diagnosis and treatment. When a patient with stroke symptoms presents in the ED, one of the first things the ED physician does is initiate a communications workflow to contact the neurologist covering that ED at that moment in time, while simultaneously notifying and mobilizing a stroke team to complete a CT scan to determine if it is safe to administer tPA, the drug that arrests the stroke. Time is critical. Healthcare is chock full of these kinds of workflows, executed every day in every hospital by the hundreds and thousands.

It will provide technology that automatically identifies and provides an immediate connection to the right care team member for any given clinical situation—this is nursing’s greatest need! Your strategy should be to bypass third parties and eliminate all the manual tools and processes used to figure out who’s in what role right now given the situation at hand. Ignoring this need means you won’t achieve adoption, which means your organization will still be at risk.

It should extend beyond any department and the four walls of the hospital. It should enable cross-organizational communication workflows. This is increasingly important under value-based care where care team members must collaborate across interdependent organizations to deliver better care.

It should secure the creation, transmission and access of ePHI across all communication modalities—not just text messaging. Enough said!

It should integrate with your other clinical systems to leverage the data within those systems to facilitate new communication workflows. This is key to enabling “real-time healthcare.”

It should provide analytics to monitor your communication processes and continuously improve those processes over time.

With these capabilities in place, secure clinical communication simply becomes another positive result of implementing a broader care team collaboration strategy, designed to address clinical efficiency and improve patient care delivery.

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3 “must-haves” for simplifying complex clinical communications

Part 3 of a 3-part series in conjunction with our nurse leadership webinar series.

Imagine a world where you launch the EMR, review a patient’s chart, and want to discuss it with the covering cardiologist that day. You click a link for the cardiologist within the EMR and it references that provider’s group workflow processes, reviews their schedules and monitors their momentary status to direct you to the correct provider. Then you type your message. The patient’s information is pulled from the EMR and is securely routed to the recipient based on their contact preference in that moment. It can happen – but this is not the norm in most healthcare facilities today.

Practicing medicine today is complex – clinicians need to consider an ever-changing landscape, federal and state regulations, not to mention the many different innovations designed to help streamline everything from care delivery to reimbursement. Adding to the complexity are the many different providers treating patients, working across various care settings with large care teams.

Given the vastness of these care networks, it can be daunting – albeit necessary – to coordinate care. One way to help connect clinicians in all care settings and improve care team collaboration is through a comprehensive communication solution.

It’s important to first understand why clinical communication is complex and why many of the technologies implemented today aren’t solving the issues clinicians are facing. Factors such as the patient’s reason for contact, the physician’s location, team coverage, degree of urgency and unassigned ER calls all impact the communication process.

Looking across varied care settings, people, processes and preferences also differ. Between inpatient and outpatient facilities, medical group practices and post-acute care, there are many variations in care team communication strategies and approaches that make it prone to gaps and breakdowns. In fact, one of the most frustrating parts of a nurse’s job is the daily battle to determine the correct covering provider.

In this complex environment with so many participants, the continuum of patient care demands that communication solutions span much further than the four walls of a hospital or practice. And as healthcare delivery models change, it’s imperative that care coordination, and the communication that drives it, be streamlined and efficient across all of these settings. When looking for a platform to simplify clinical communication, healthcare organizations should keep the following three “must have” capabilities in mind:

Span the entire care continuum: A comprehensive solution must address the needs of all care team members across all types of settings – from a single hospital to a multi-site system, as well as outpatient practices and care settings. They all have different demands and communication requirements. For example, larger practices and hospitals need advanced directory capabilities to bring the opportunity to coordinate care based on facility, group or ACOs, with the appropriate workflow processes built in. In addition, the solution should have the ability to generate real-time patient updates – such as when the patient presents to the emergency department, is discharged home, or when important results are available. This is essential to timely coordination of care. Finally, it’s imperative that the communication solution connect to the organization’s other HIT systems to maintain integration for alarms and alerts, such as if stroke team is activated. It’s critical that covering providers respond quickly and that a back-up process is in place.

Provide a standardized, yet flexible way to communicate: Clinicians should have flexible, yet standardized communication options that allow their messages to be routed appropriately and securely, and account for today’s technology. Gone are the days of referencing binders, faxed schedules or notes taped to the wall or desk. Once the communication process is initiated, the process should seamlessly connect you with the correct covering provider for the clinical situation at hand – whether through call, text or via a mobile app.

Address process complexities with intelligent routing: Schedules, workgroup rules, team mobilization requirements and escalation paths should all be configured so that you are connected to the right care team member with real-time accuracy. A solution with dynamic intelligent routing is able to deliver messages at the right time, to the right person in any given clinical situation. Clinicians should be able to customize based on their device and delivery preferences, and make changes based on their activity (e.g., what to do with a call while in the OR).

The goal is simple: Remove the variability, the hand offs and the touch points that introduce risk and opportunities for communication breakdowns. Initiate the communication in the manner you wish, and let the process connect you to the correct covering provider for your clinical situation at any moment in time.

While efficient clinical communication is a challenge, the right solution can lead to tremendous benefits for every care team member, as well as the organization. The solution must be comprehensive, providing standardization and the ability to streamline the communications process. By implementing technology that addresses these three areas, healthcare organizations will not only be able to improve clinical communication, but will ultimately improve the experience for patients, and the extended care team.

Interested in learning more? Read part 1 and part 2 of this series on nurse leadership in care team collaboration.

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Building an effective care team collaboration strategy: 4 focal points

Part 2 of a 3-part series in conjunction with our nurse leadership webinar series.

The need to unify physicians, nurses and other care team members through effective communication at the point of care is growing in significance. According to a 2015 Gartner report, 80 percent of providers report deploying fragmented communication technologies, which results in degraded care team communication and collaboration.

Collaboration is both a process and an outcome. It affects the patient experience, outcomes and care occurring across a variety of settings in an increasingly complex and mobile environment.

To resolve the fragmented and non-secure communication encountered in healthcare, true care team collaboration is dependent on consolidating disparate technologies into a single solution capable of directly addressing the communication obstacles degrading patient care today.

To some, this may sound like an unachievable goal, but with a strategic plan focused in areas that facilitate workflow processes and communication leading to improved patient care, it is attainable.

You may wonder, where do I even begin? Many organizations, in response to specific challenges, have deployed single-point technologies that provide only incremental gains. True clinical communication and collaboration requires a comprehensive strategy, and to begin you must carefully evaluate your entire communication landscape. You’ll need to assess your current technologies, HIPAA compliance plan, near miss or sentinel event occurrences, nursing time to reach providers and consult notifications procedures – all of which will highlight your clinical communication strengths and weaknesses.

Developing a comprehensive care team collaboration strategy spans four major areas of consideration. Failure to address any one of these areas may leave you with an incomplete solution. Each organization is unique, certainly, but departments and organizations must work together to create an environment ripe for collaboration.

Clinical – Mobile technologies are becoming more prevalent in healthcare settings, thus the need to leverage these technologies to facilitate secure communication amongst the care team is becoming increasingly important. A clinical communications solution should enable communication-driven workflows to facilitate timely care team communication. The solution should facilitate direct conversations among nurses and physicians via the preferred mode of contact – be it a mobile phone, pager, email or office land line. By triaging incoming calls and applying personalized algorithms for call placement, care team members reach the correct physician without searching through call schedules.
Operational – Once your plan is in place, bringing it to life warrants consideration and considerable forethought. A well-defined adoption strategy will be key to a successful implementation. Clinical champions help drive decisions and engage end users. Leadership engagement is often the most essential driver of adoption of any initiative, plan or policy. You should also consider and plan around timelines, specific tasks and resource requirements.
Technical – To achieve success, understanding and addressing technical infrastructure is a must. The strength of your Wi-Fi and cellular networks should be evaluated. Does your organization have a device strategy or do you have a BYOD policy? Do you desire integration with clinical systems and is the solution you are considering interoperable?
Financial – In any financial consideration, ultimate ROI and total cost of ownership are needed to justify approaches. When you close communication gaps across the extended care team to facilitate patient care collaboration, you can potentially improve referral revenue, decrease readmissions and avoid penalty costs. The ability to do mobile charge capture at the bedside, and to quickly and fully document exam and procedure details at the point of care will result in revenue recognition and improved cash flow for physicians.

There is no short list of considerations when it comes to building an effective care team collaboration strategy. However, if you focus on these four areas, gain support of leadership and identify a solution that hits these marks, you will be well on your way to effectively addressing your communication and collaboration needs.

Interested in learning more? Read part 1 and part 3 of this series on nurse leadership in care team collaboration.

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Nurses need innovative care team collaboration technology

Part 1 of a 3-part series in conjunction with our nurse leadership webinar series.

Six years ago, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), formerly the Institute of Medicine (IOM), recommended that nurses lead inter-professional collaboration and healthcare delivery improvement and redesign. They noted that nurses are uniquely positioned to do this since, given the care setting, they are quite often the primary patient caregiver. As such, they serve as the virtual linchpin of care—connecting the various care providing professions while coordinating patient care across the entire care team. Toward that end, nurses are responsible for over 90% of physician communications while directing over 80% of their own communications to the broader care team.

While some inroads have been made in regard to this IOM recommendation, there are formidable challenges impeding significant progress. As the industry transitions to value-based-care, nurses are being held increasingly more accountable for patient outcomes and experience. Paradoxically, they are concurrently being asked to perform more indirect and non-patient-care tasks which reduce the amount of time at the patient bedside—one of the strongest predictors of positive patient outcomes and experience.

One such activity is care team communication.

Specifically, nurses have reported that difficulty communicating with the care team has decreased direct patient care time. One survey study found that 75% of nurse respondents reported wasting valuable care time just attempting to communicate with physicians and other care team members. In part, as 50% of the respondents acknowledged, this is because they are unaware of the right care team member to contact for the clinical situation at hand. The latter explains why the majority of physicians reported being frequently erroneously contacted when not the right physician for the situation.

These recalcitrant obstacles to care team communication and collaboration have served to delay patient care and prolong patient wait times. No one is more acutely aware of this than the nurse.

Nurses quite often find themselves waiting for physicians to return phone calls/pages while their patient needlessly suffers. As the nurse struggles to coordinate care, no one is more cognizant of the impact of missed care or delayed transitions on the patient and the patient’s family. Moreover, no one is more handicapped by the limits of fragmented communication technologies that have not successfully overcome these challenges because they only address a small component of the overall problem. And no one is in more need, than the nurse, for innovative technology that is able to immediately connect the right care team members to facilitate timely collaboration.

The good news is that this technology is now available. However, when evaluating the various care team collaboration platforms, it is important to avoid common pitfalls. Here are a few guiding principles to keep in mind:

While secure messaging is a salient feature of the platform, it is not wholly sufficient to address these communication obstacles since it is dependent upon two flawed assumptions.
1. The recipient, such as the physician, must desire to be contacted at all times for all situations every day of the week.
2. The sender, for example, the nurse, knows who to contact in every single situation.

All of the care team must be on the same platform. As the IOM noted, “True inter-professional collaboration can be accomplished only in concert with other health professionals, not within the nursing profession alone.” This holds true for any other profession.

Most importantly, the technology must be purposefully designed to overcome the known referenced obstacles. To do this, it must be able to automatically identify and provide immediate connection to the right care team member for that particular clinical situation. This type of complex logic requires that for every single communication by every care team member, the contextual variables of the particular message must be analyzed in real time to ensure the communication is routed to the correct individual.

The care team collaboration platform capabilities must transcend the walls of any one facility. Nurses, as well as physicians and other care team members, quite frequently need to contact team members who work in and across other facilities and locations. The platform must be able to support this communication and the intelligent routing capabilities must extend to provide immediate identification and connection to these care team members when needed.

Ultimately, the care team collaboration platform must have proven functionality to reduce communication cycle times. Reducing the time to connect and close the communication loop translates into care team efficiency and increased patient care time. As every nurse knows, this means speed to treatment, improved patient experience and improved patient outcomes.

Nurses are indeed perfectly positioned to lead inter-professional collaboration and healthcare delivery improvement. However, it is critical that they are provided with the technology that will allow them to overcome all the challenges this entails.

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Let us not repeat the mistakes of the past—providing nurses with inadequate technology in response to which, they must find a work around—increasing their effort and workload in the endeavor. Quite sincerely, healthcare improvement and reform depends on it.

Interested in learning more? Read part 2 and part 3 of this series on nurse leadership in care team collaboration.

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