Unified Communications in Healthcare

Healthcare is an industry that depends on effective and efficient collaboration to ensure high standards for patient care.  The quality of that care builds the reputation of the organizations and professionals that are essential to long term success.  Effective communication, allows for quick and efficient collaboration between sites, departments and people.  When we think about technology in healtcare from the perspective of the consulting firms that provide it, EMR is the primary tool set that comes to mind.  It is the patient record, the scheduling engine, the quality control, the protocol governor that will increasingly control and manage the admission of care for patients.  It collects, categorizes and facilities access to information that is critical to the operation of any healthcare organization. 

What do you do with the data in your EMR?

EMR gives you access to the patient record and helps facilitate the correlation and sharing of that information.  Where the EMR stops is helping today’s healthcare professionals execute on a plan and coordinate distributed teams of physicians, nurses and professionals to act on that data.  How do you put into motion the plan for patient care quickly and effectively?

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) capabilities allow for the needed connections letting healthcare professionals act on the information they have collected and analyzed in the patient record.  Good communication can have a profound effect on the quality of patient care.  Regardless of how good any individual in the organization is, without the ability to communicate findings and treatment plans to other teams and units the patient only gets the benefit of the individual and not the group.  Historically, communications options in the healthcare field have been extremely limited.  Primary tools still consist of telephones, pagers, faxes and interoffice mail systems. In many industries, a much wider array of capabilities are utilized.  True collaboration relies on the ability to initiate synchronous or asynchronous communication with anyone in the medical community. 

How can collaboration improve?

Unified Communications relies on "presence" at its foundation.  This allows medical professionals to quickly determine if a doctor, nurse or other professional “available” for communication.  This can be determined by their proximity to a tablet computer, handheld device or with integration into scheduling software.  With the knowledge of availability, teams can find the right person based on both skillset and availability to immediately begin a collaborative process for care. 

The impact is that we are not limited to utilizing a telephone as the only way to communicate in real-time with other professionals.  Depending on the setting, urgency or location we can use instant messaging, voice conversations or video conferencing.  The tools needed for these forms of communication can range from tablet PC’s to PDA devices to desktop computers. There is no longer the need to work through a list of people that can help you leaving voicemail messages or paging and waiting for a response.  If another professional is needed, you simple look them up on your device and initiate the appropriate form of communication.  No need to look up phone numbers, pager numbers or email addresses.

Beyond the phone call and instant message.

As communication technology converges to make devices ubiquitous we find that teams locate resources faster. Teams become empowered to speed the decision process and break down traditional boundaries and hierarchies of communications. What we find is that people are able to connect at a speed and ease that they are not accustomed to seeing.  Collaboration will begin to evolve within the organization ad staff will naturally begin integrating the view to the patient record into the communication process.  Staff will begin to share the images on their devices with others in one-to-one or one-to-many collaborative meetings.  The collaboration will extend to incorporate a rich array of video, application sharing and real-time interaction with the patient record.   

 

What is next?

The fact that healthcare is rapidly moving to a paperless environment at a much faster pace that other industries positions it for an explosive use of these multi-media collaboration tools.  The biggest inhibitors to this transformation are:

1. Lack of awareness around the potential of Unified Communications & Collaboration
2. Reluctance of healthcare professionals to adopt new ways of communicating
3. Concerns around security of information with the new tools

Ultimately, these are the same concerns discussed with the migration from paper charts to EMR systems.  Unified Communications has the ability to take the productivity and usefulness of the EMR systems to the next level by making the information it contains actionable. 

Below is a good video to allow a look at how these tools can be used in a clinical environment.  Take a look and see what you think.  Leave your comments and ask questions.