Clinical Communication Systems: More Than a Text

Today’s solutions are all about helping you deliver patient care — wherever it happens.

What comes to mind when you hear the term Clinical Communication Solution? If you’re like many people, it’s an image of a clinician on a smartphone. While secure mobile messaging is an important component of many clinical communication solutions, it is far from the only reason so many organizations rely on these technologies today. Let’s review just a few of the use-cases that can make unified communication so powerful in healthcare — from the bedside to the nurse’s station to the palm of your hand.

Unified Communication Can Help You Support Patient Safety Goals¹

Nurses are busy — and each patient presents their own unique risks and challenges. Are your technology investments doing enough to help them stay connected to their patients and deliver the best care possible?

With unified communications, you can break down data siloes and harness data from a wide variety of sources to alert your clinicians to their patients’ needs. For example:

• Support falls reduction initiatives with bed exit protocols that alert staff to patient activity that could contribute to falls¹
• Help protect patients’ skin with automated turn reminders¹
• Help address pulmonary risks with head-of-bed angle indicators¹

Unified Communication Can Help You Enhance Patient Satisfaction Efforts

When a patient request comes in, the more information you have, the better prepared you are to respond effectively. With unified communication solutions, your teams can count on the context they need to help get patients what they need — the first time.² For example:

• Route requests to the right person to help them respond faster.³ For example, this could mean sending pain management requests to the patient’s RN, ice chip requests to the CNA and service alerts to the Biomed team.
• Analyze requests over time to inform continuous improvement initiatives. For example, if a unit using mobile alerts has consistently faster response times than other units, could this model be expanded to any other parts of the hospital?

Unified Communication Can Help You Address Alarm Fatigue

Today’s hospitals are filled with smart devices designed to inform clinical decisions. But if the technologies and the data they generate are siloed, clinicians may find themselves drowning in unactionable data — and facing the dangerous threat of alarm fatigue. How can unified communications help?

• Customize escalation pathways to elevate relevant information for each caregiver⁴
• Connect monitors from disparate vendors through a single communication platform that helps unify workflows⁵

Unified Communication Can Help Enhance Patient-Centric Collaboration

How easily can your care teams stay connected to patient status when they’re away from the bedside? With unified communication solutions, you can connect data from a wide range of devices, including patient monitors and telemetry solutions, and share monitoring data with the people who need it. For example:

• View and store near-real-time data from a variety of monitoring systems⁶
• Digitize telemetry workflows to document cardiac monitoring without paper strips⁷

References

1-7. Baxter data on file