How Effective Communication Helps Organizations Achieve the Quintuple Aim Part 2
In this second part of our blog post we continue our look at how contact center software can help healtchare organizations achieve the Quintuple Aim.
Timely, Efficient, Patient-Centered Care for an Improved Clinical Experience
Getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time can improve patient care. The need for efficient, reliable communication is present throughout a patient’s journey. A hospital’s contact center is the hub of communication for an organization’s calls and chats and the same software that is used at the center can also be leveraged within the hospital or clinic to improve clinical communication and workflows.
When a patient is admitted into a hospital, they may be moved from one room to another while waiting for tests and procedures, and during recovery. It can become difficult to locate and communicate with a patient once they are receiving care within the system.
A robust contact center platform can assign a fixed phone number to each patient to follow the patient for the duration of their stay. Associating each patient with one phone number helps ease the stress of family and friends who are trying to contact them, streamline the communication process for anyone on the patient’s care team, and reduce the number of calls to the hospital’s contact center.
Contact center software can work together with a hospital’s event notification software system to expedite enterprise-wide critical alerts in healthcare environments by capturing requests from ADT (Admission, Discharge, and Transfer) messages, nurse call messages, smart beds, pain management, alerts, alarms, orders, or appointments. Then, emergency notification software instantly sends those messages to designated medical staff recipients using a wide variety of methods, including Vocera badges, IP phones from Cisco and Spectralink, SMS, e-mail, secure messaging apps, and more. All statistics can also be accumulated for each notification to provide an easy-to-follow audit trail for reporting purposes and to help healthcare organizations refine their communication processes.
Enhancing Patient and Staff Safety with Web-based Communication
The ability to access health information at any time from virtually any place is a fundamental and critical part of any healthcare organization’s communication protocol. Hospital personnel can use some of the same web-based communication software that is used in their call center to deliver fast, secure, communications.
- Secure Messaging: Secure organizational communication is crucial for protecting patients, medical staff, and hospital organizations. HIPAA-compliant messaging apps send secure text, photo, audio, and video content while protecting patient privacy. These apps can be used via smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. Secure messaging apps can be leveraged to simplify collaborative care to provide a better patient experience, and speed the process of patient admissions, lab results, patient transport, and more. An additional benefit of secure messaging is the ability to triage low-priority alerts and route alarms directly to clinician devices to reduce sensory overload for both patients and care providers. Patient care is improved when important alarms get a response as quickly as possible, but a restful, quiet healing environment is also important for patient recovery.
- Care Team Collaboration: Mobile-friendly care team collaboration applications are used by nurses, physicians, and other staff to remotely access on-call schedules, directories, messages, reports, and more.
- Workforce Management: Staff can view, edit, copy, override, assign, and unassign schedules in real-time. They can use directories to quickly find and contact staff and use the reporting function to track, view, and print communications.
Correcting inefficient communication can help an organization towards their Triple, Quadruple, or even Quintuple Aim. Using the tools and software that may already be available in a hospital’s contact center provides a path to successfully attain the goals of the entire enterprise.