How One Health System Consolidated Tech to Improve Clinical Collaboration

A large healthcare organization located in the Southeastern U.S. was using five different modalities for clinical communication, bloating its information technology budget and decreasing the efficacy and efficiency of its clinical collaboration and care delivery.

The health system sought to unify its technology infrastructure by consolidating its  communication modalities onto one platform. In doing so, the health system sought to also improve clinical workflows—such as admission, transfer, discharge, consults, and critical team activation.

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Additionally, like most healthcare organizations nationwide in 2020-2021, the health system was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It needed to expedite care delivery while improving collaboration between care teams.

"It isn’t hard to quantify the outcomes [symplr Clinical Communications] has helped us achieve. Technology consolidation and user adoption often are not easy to accomplish, but we now have thousands of active users collaborating on one, unified platform. With that as our foundation, we’re set up for success." - Director of Information and Analytics Services.

THE METHOD

The health system selected symplr Clinical Communications to consolidate its clinical communication on one, unified platform, allowing it to eliminate technologies such as pagers, multiple clinical phone systems, and a communication platform.

It also empowered staff to communicate using the mobile devices they already owned.

The platform streamlined communication through its native on-call scheduling and role-based communication functionality.

Clinical teams no longer had to navigate multiple scheduling systems or directories for consults—they could message the on-call physician role and have their communication routed to the appropriate person, instantly.

While feeling the heavy impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the system saw improved patient throughput, expedited care delivery, and surges in platform utilization. During the pandemic, messaging and urgent messaging increased dramatically—validating both user adoption and ease of use during challenging circumstances.

"Physicians are often inundated with pages and calls, both when they’re on service and when they’re not because of miscommunications regarding on-call scheduling. [symplr] has streamlined our communication and reduced that burden—drastically impacting our physician satisfaction." —Chief Medical Information Officer

THE RESULTS

Through its use of symplr Clinical Communications, the health system saw a:

  • 85% pager reduction
  • 35% reduction in overhead paging and direct calls
  • 57% reduction in steps required for Code Stroke activation 
  • 30% increase in sent messages per user during the COVID-19 pandemic, with an even greater increase in messaging to Critical Teams (i.e., Code SEMI; Code Blue)

"With our previous communication infrastructure, our clinical staff would have to wait for a response to their pages to continue a patient’s care. [symplr Clinical Communications] has saved our staff at least three to five min per outreach, because their messages are received and responded to without delay." —Chief Nursing Informatics Officer. 

 

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