Breaking Down Silos in Communication to Enhance Nurse Mobility

A Top-Ranked Academic Medical Center

This success story focuses on a large academic medical center that specializes in musculoskeletal health. In addition to this main hospital location, the organization also has clinics spread across three states. The hospital performs more than 15,000 admissions and 30,000 surgical procedures annually and regularly profiles as one of the top-ranked hospitals in orthopedics and rheumatology.

Siloed Communication Causes Inefficiency

With separate departments using siloed communication processes, team members struggling to route calls to the right provider, and providers carrying hospital-owned pagers that were incapable of prioritizing urgent notifications, this hospital sought to eliminate various inefficiencies by modernizing communication workflows to streamline the coordination of patient care.

Transitioning to a Shared System for Communication

The hospital implemented PerfectServe’s Clinical Collaboration solution to successfully transition from pagers to smartphones, from disparate communication processes to a centralized contact system, and from delayed communication to instant connection with the right provider at the right time.

Sunsetting Pagers to Unlock Real-Time Collaboration

The hospital engaged PerfectServe to transition away from pagers to shared smartphones for nurses and personally owned smartphones for providers, equipping all new devices with one platform to bridge communication across the patient care continuum. Capable of messaging smartphones, workstations on wheels (WOWs), and legacy pagers, the PerfectServe app allowed users to initiate voice or text messages directly from a central organizational directory, searchable by department, role, on-call shift, patient care team, and more.

PerfectServe worked with each department at the hospital to design custom workflows to appropriately direct calls. To reduce care delays and dropped communication, the customized workflows were optimized using Dynamic Intelligent Routing®, PerfectServe’s proprietary rule-based technology that ensures each message reaches the right clinician at the right time.

The new system used ringtone variation to indicate the urgency of message alerts and allowed recipients to delay nonurgent messages during surgery, patient encounters, and time off. Transitioning to smartphones mobilized nurses by giving them easy access to patient information and provider communication at the bedside, helping them maintain focus on patient care.

Reducing Communication Cycle Times to Improve the Speed of Care

PerfectServe helped the hospital dramatically reduce its communication cycle times, empowering care team members to initiate up to 20,000 conversations every month. Here are the results:

• 75% of messages read or acknowledged in under five minutes.
• 90% of messages read or acknowledged in under 15 minutes.
• 78% of messages from the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) and inpatient floors acknowledged or read in under five minutes.
• 91% of messages from the PACU and inpatient floors read in under 15 minutes.
• 98.6% of Modified Early Warning Scores (MEWS) alerts read in under five minutes.

Better Communication, Better Patient Care

For clinical teams looking to streamline patient care and improve key hospital metrics, optimizing your clinical communication solution is a major step in the right direction. By integrating PerfectServe with the EHR and other key systems like Advanced Directory, this hospital optimized communication and care team coordination workflows to achieve significant results benefiting the organization, staff, and patients.