At the Heart of Healthcare Communications

When I headed to Atlanta for HIMSS 2010, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I quickly came to the realization, though, that the healthcare industry is facing the very same challenges every other industry is struggling to overcome – rising costs, process inefficiencies, and a need to increase customer satisfaction in order to drive business success.

As I made my way from booth to booth at the Georgia World Congress Center, it quickly became apparent that the same fundamentals that are driving communications innovation in the enterprise space are also critical elements of the healthcare communications environment. Specifically, two guiding principles are helping vendors ensure the right information reaches the right people at the right time in the right format. Namely, process automation and interoperability are the keys to providing better patient care and satisfaction.

Take Teletracking, an 18-year-old company that specializes in patient flow automation, whose Vice President of Product Management Jason Baim noted that, “Communications is inherently inefficient in emergency facilities today.”

More specifically, capacity management poses a distinct challenge in healthcare facilities, which typically do not have the technology to adequately identify where patients are in their care process, leading to inefficiencies in asset recycling. For instance, facilities aren’t immediately aware when beds, rooms, or other assets have been vacated and, therefore, aren’t aware of when they can be prepped for a new patient, creating often lengthy wait times for incoming patients, lowering patient turnover, cutting into margins, and negatively impacting patient satisfaction.

Teletracking has developed a suite of applications that automates finding the appropriate beds for patients, based on their specific needs, including tracking them through their care process, from admitting to discharge, and then facilitating prepping for the next patient. Its newest application, Transfer Center, is used to automate and facilitate the transfer of patients between facilities, extending its process efficiency enhancements throughout the healthcare system beyond individual facilities. On the back end, hospitals are able to track their progress using analytical data, such as average time from bed request to availability, or average transport wait time.

Similarly, Avaya (News - Alert), combining its own healthcare portfolio with technology it gained from its acquisition of Nortel, is helping hospitals reduce down time by enabling more efficient tracking and utilization of assets to more effectively move patients through their care processes. Avaya, whose communications platform is already deployed at more than 4,000 hospitals, has taken its core solutions and developed purpose-built applications around them for the healthcare industry.

These include Nortel (News - Alert)’s Mobile Device Checkout and tracking technology, which uses barcodes to create a simplified, yet highly effective process for assigning wireless phones to staff, eliminating the challenges of knowing which device is attached to whom and where they are within the facility.

The Avaya Nurse Call Response System then ensures information, requests, or calls are immediately delivered to the best caregiver, based on qualifications, availability, and physical location. It also leverages IVR technology for asset location, dispatching, and response.

The Patient Admit Coordinator, an electronic workflow automation solution, leverages the communications network to accelerate the admission and discharge processes (traditionally paper-based processes), helping overcome overcrowding issues and enhancing the patient flow process.

And, its Patient Appointment Reminder capability provides automatic reminders to patients and collecting confirmations, reducing missed appointments and associated costs. It can also be used to remind patients to take their medication or to follow their exercise routines, reducing costly readmissions.

Looking at the healthcare process from a different angle, Symantec (News - Alert) is addressing the need for increased storage for medical imaging, the need for which is predicted to grow at a rate of 20-40 percent annually. Its healthcare division has developed Symantec Health, which includes Symantec Health Safe and Symantec Health Image Share.

The former is a secure hosted storage and archiving solution, using a pay-as-you-go pricing model, designed to lower storage costs and operational tasks related to tracking, filing, and retrieving images. It also doubles as a BC/DR solution – in the instance a facility experiences network outages, all of its stored images will be safe and accessible from anywhere.

Symantec Health Image Share takes those image stores and allows for sharing between doctors and organizations. For instance, if I had injured my knee in Atlanta, a local physician would be able to contact my doctor in Connecticut, be granted temporary access to specific images of my old knee injury to determine whether the latest incident is new or the result of a pre-existing condition. He would also be able to upload new images, so my physician would then have a complete set of images if I need to see him for a follow-up visit upon returning home.

Polycom (News - Alert) is leveraging industry standards to enable what it calls “connected healthcare” – seamless communication between the patients and various caregivers, regardless of location. Medtronics, with its focus on interop and standards, uses devices like its CareLink Monitor and CareLink Programmer to enhance data collection and delivery from patient devices to physicians, either manually or automatically. And there were many others, including a firsthand look at how the Microsoft (News - Alert) Surface and Windows 7 touchscreen PCs are being used to increase collaboration between caregivers and patients.

But, at the heart of it all was a driving desire to facilitate better care for patients through the use of the latest communications technology. For more on these and other healthcare solutions, check out TMCnet’s healthcare technology site (healthcare-technology.tmcnet.com). IT

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