When clinicians say, “time is tissue,” they mean it literally. A stroke patient loses about 1.9 million neurons every minute they’re untreated. And timely care can mean the difference between making a full recovery or suffering a lifelong disability.
During a stroke emergency, health systems activate their acute stroke team by calling a Code Stroke alert. This prompts a team of ER physicians & nurses, neurologists, and radiologists to stand by to receive and care for the patient within minutes.
One large southeastern health system had a similar process, but it took seven steps and five channels (including pagers, EHRs, and phone calls) to notify the whole team. Well aware of the potential impact of communication breakdowns and delays on patients’ lives, the organization’s leaders sought a solution to consolidate their many systems.
They needed a solution that would help shorten response times, reduce the number of communication channels, and provide the acute stroke team with more information about the patient (i.e. demographics, symptoms, vital signs, etc.).
When looking for a clinical communications solution, there are five attributes to keep in mind:
1. Unified approach
Your organization should be able to consolidate all modes of communication onto one platform, retiring legacy tools like pagers and eliminating silos in the process. This will lower costs, complexity, and administrative burden. The solution should also integrate with third-party clinical apps and all major acute EHRs.
2. Role-based messaging
The solution should allow users to reach roles or teams, unlike an individual-based system that places the burden on staff to reach the right people at the right time. For example, nurses should be able to reach the specialist on call without checking a schedule, and critical care team members should be alerted simultaneously at the push of a button. Should a message go unanswered, the system should automatically escalate it to the next available staff member.
3. Two-way communication
Users should have the ability to easily reply within the same app and device instead of having to call back by phone, as is the case with pagers. They should also be able to receive read receipts instead of waiting around for the recipient to acknowledge a message. Minimizing the use of one-way tools, like leaving notes on the EHR, can speed up communication and lower the risk of miscommunication.
4. Secure and compliant
Users should be able to send almost anything (i.e. files, texts, voice clips) securely, in compliance with security and privacy standards such as HIPAA, HITRUST, and SOC 2 Type II. In contrast, many legacy tools like pagers do not have the same protections. This significantly raises the risk of data breaches, which may result in regulatory fines, reputation damage, or even operational disruptions.
5. User-friendly
An effective solution must be intuitive and user-friendly. This is crucial because the value your organization gets from the solution depends on how widely and quickly it is adopted. Ideally, the solution should also be fully managed as a service, which would free up your organization’s IT team from having to maintain any infrastructure themselves.
The most important factor for effective communication is using a solution specifically designed for clinical communications. EHRs were created for one-way documentation, not two-way messaging. Other tools like pagers and desk phones can deliver messages, but increase the risks of miscommunication, alarm fatigue, and compliance issues.
Clinical communications health check
With healthcare workforces under increasing strain and patients demanding better care, it’s critical to ensure your communication system can support these challenges. Evaluate your current system—and any potential replacements—by asking these key questions:
- Does this solution unify our key communication and collaboration needs?
- What existing technology could the solution replace or consolidate?
- Does this solution enable role and team-based communication?
- Does this solution integrate with our other must-be-retained clinical applications?
- Does this solution meet our security and compliance requirements?
- Does the solution require extensive IT support?
- Will the solution work on all devices used in our facilities?
- How complex is implementation? How extensive is the training required?
- Is the solution designed for all clinical roles and departments?
Like many other organizations, the southeastern health system had reservations about retiring legacy tools. But the transformative outcomes they saw after adopting a collaboration tool designed by and for clinicians—including a 57% reduction in steps required for Code Stroke activation and a 14% reduction in door-to-needle times—put those concerns to rest.
