Health System Enhances Patient & Provider Experiences with Better Clinical Communication

Prisma Health Upstate—formerly known as Greenville Health System—is a health system with eight inpatient hospitals and more than 100 outpatient facilities and affiliated practices throughout Upstate South Carolina. With a staff of more than 15,000 care team members covering everything from preventive medicine to complex surgeries across multiple locations, high user adoption of successful communication workflows was necessary to facilitate efficient transitions of care across locations.

Challenges

An internal physician informatics study revealed that collectively, Prisma Health clinicians were wasting 28.39 hours every shift attempting to communicate with one another. Dr. Nicholas Perkins, DO, Hospitalist and Physicians Informaticist for Prisma Health, engaged the then-Telmediq team to design and implement a clinical communication system that provided efficient access to clinicians and clinical data. PerfectServe acquired Telmediq in 2019 and continues to support and develop the Clinical Collaboration powered by Telmediq platform.

Implementation

The Telmediq team worked closely with Prisma Health’s multifunctional clinical team to map out their clinical communication workflows and recommend a deployment path that would not only meet current requirements, but improve others for faster and more accurate care delivery. To enable the deployment’s success, Prisma Health required a few key integrations—Epic to pull in the patient census, the physician scheduling solution for up-to-date call schedules, and the pager network to preserve existing pager numbers.

Results

Senior leadership at Prisma Health endorsed and promoted the Telmediq deployment to drive user adoption, but its ultimate success was achieved in the value clinicians realized. Namely:

• Enhanced Paging Functionality: Existing pager numbers were routed through Telmediq, offering the reliability and trackability of the cloud-based platform, two-way communication, and enhanced workflow capabilities—all without disrupting established workflows.
• Streamlined Communications: With a built-in scheduling solution and the ability to integrate with other scheduling platforms, Telmediq provided a system-wide scheduling view of every department in the organization. The centralized schedule was used to automatically route messages to the correct provider while allowing staff to identify and communicate directly with on-call clinicians without having to track them down.
• Clinical Data Interoperability: Integration with the EHR dramatically reduced care delays by allowing clinical teams to easily access patient records, including relevant care team messages, at the point of care. Clinicians no longer needed to log into multiple systems or exit the patient’s bedside to retrieve critical information. The ability to include patient history from the EHR, attach HIPAA-compliant images, and view complete message threads gave clinicians essential context to facilitate better care decisions.
• Automatic Message Escalation: Workflow rules were implemented to ensure that urgent messages would be escalated if unanswered within a predetermined period of time. Telmediq built workflows into the platform to reduce misdirected messages and created a pager monitoring feature for physicians in the OR. Prisma Health’s paging protocol prevented indiscriminate messaging and applied guidelines around the messaging chain of command, when physicians could be paged, and appropriate response times.
• Auditability: Telmediq’s delivery and read receipts enabled Prisma Health administrators and clinicians to track the status of individual messages, as well as metrics on how long it took for clinicians to respond, which helped identify communication inefficiencies to target for improvement.

Conclusion

Prisma Health’s implementation of PerfectServe’s cloud-based Telmediq solution eliminated collaboration inefficiencies, dramatically reduced care delays, and expedited patient throughput, improving both patient and clinician satisfaction.

Implemented Solutions

• Legacy device network integration
• On-call schedule integration
• HIPAA-compliant messaging
• EHR integration
• Automatic message escalation
• Auditing and tracking of communication workflows