Unified Communication Systems

Enhancing patient care

It is somewhat incredulous that in this day and age, the pervasive communications tools in healthcare remain the pager and the pen! This lag in technology adoption poses significant risk for patients because it fails to provide real time access between clinicians and genuine coordination of care. In fact, there are many cases around the world where patients have died because they were not connected with the appropriate medical expertise in a timely manner.

Challenges faced by healthcare professionals today
Healthcare is an information science and the pace of discovery of new diagnostics and therapeutics is far outstripping the health system’s ability to share this new knowledge. The medical workforce is responding to this explosion in new medical evidence by ‘super-specialising’—making an already fragmented workforce even further fragmented. Furthermore, each clinician’s referral network is usually quite small. It is generally made up of the colleagues they went to university with and people that they previously (or currently) worked with. Technology needs to play a role in expanding each clinician’s referral network.

Other compounding challenges caregivers face includes:

Proliferation of paper-based healthcare records
The growing amount of paper-based information and patient records in today’s healthcare organisations make it difficult to find and aggregate the patient information caregivers need. Disconnected and proprietary information systems can also lead to high error rates as physicians have to wade through data from multiple sources to find what they need. Caregivers need a way to share critical patient information and knowledge in a timely and accurate manner, but making it easy for clinicians to access patient data is not necessarily the magic bullet. This is because while connecting clinicians with data provides them with access to information; it does not necessarily connect them with experience (each other). While our health systems grapple with the challenge of sharing information, Unified Communications tools, can connect clinicians with peers who have a deeper understanding of the ailment or just as important, know the patient better.

Diversity of healthcare teams
Caregivers today are increasingly working as part of a team, with general practitioners, specialists, pharmacists, community care nurses all caring for the same patient. Given this diversity of patient-care teams, healthcare professionals can be crippled by an inability to provide time-sensitive information to each other. For busy healthcare professionals who are always on the go, having a way to bridge the distances and collaborate is critical to the patient care process.

Constant innovation and training
The relative absence of real-time connectivity between clinicians means that healthcare has not yet benefited from the network effect that other industries have leveraged for transferring skills. There is no way that a clinician can read every journal article that is published and being disconnected from each other exacerbates the challenge of disseminating information amongst their teams and colleagues. Healthcare organisations also often find it expensive to lead, train and educate staff from remote locations. In a people- and knowledge-driven industry like healthcare, quick and effortless access to relevant and up-to-date information, people and insights is critical to success, and workforce development requires an effective communication and collaboration system.

Tailor-made for caregivers wanting to be less isolated
Enter Unified Communications, an integrated software platform that unifies voice, video and data communications, allowing on-demand collaboration. As clinicians become more mobile, Unified Communications enables employees spread across a group’s network to connect with their colleagues in remote environments and access critical patient records, medical information and opinions from the devices and applications they know and use. Unified communication tools can even connect clinicians with colleagues that they previously may not know or have access to.

To understand how Unified Communications can be used by caregivers in their day-to-day work, take the example of a hospital intern who makes daily rounds in the hospital and needs an urgent specialist consultation for one of his patients.

Using Office Communicator on his Windows Mobile-device, he can get an immediate view of the doctors in the hospital directory and their areas of expertise. The intern is now no longer restricted to the specialists he knows, but has immediate access to a range of people in the organisation with the appropriate skills.

The sophisticated ‘presence’ information in Unified Communication allows him / her to instantly see what a specialist in the hospital is doing at that point in time. For example, the specialist may be making rounds or be in an operating theatre and therefore unavailable. However, the intern now has a range of other specialists that are between patients and therefore able to respond. He can then use a range of communication options to seek advice, such as sending an Instant Message (IM), requesting a quick telephone conversation, setting up an instant video conference (even from the mobile device) or simply sending an email for less urgent issues.

Care teams can also consult colleagues in other locations on patient care and treatment options by firing up a Web conference in Instant Messenger. Their contacts could be in another part of the same hospital, another part of the country, or in a different country altogether.

Unified Communications enables knowledge to be shared real-time and geographical distances to be bridged. These tools create peer to peer networks creating more instantaneous knowledge-driven decisions which will result in greater efficiencies in health systems and improved outcomes for patients. Healthcare is also benefiting from the fact that Unified Communications tools have become commodities, which means price points are now well within their budgets.

Success exemplified
Eastern Health in Victoria, Australia, is an example of a hospital that is leveraging Unified Communications to enable healthcare providers to go the extra mile for patients. The organisation provides public healthcare services to a population of 800,000 people across an area of 2,800 square kilometres.

With more than 7,000 staff working in five hospitals, Eastern Health relied on e-mail and voice mail to contact its practitioners. Therefore, the hospital wanted an integrated messaging solution to streamline collaboration and cut operating costs. To keep costs down and ease user transition, Eastern Health also wanted to expand the reach to their significantly mobile fleet where workers often keep in contact using a range of handheld mobile devices and phones, by deploying a solution that could be integrated with other existing applications such as IM, and would allow the future implementation of conference using Voice over IP (VoIP).

With Unified Communications, Eastern Health successfully created an environment that enables Eastern Health staff—both in hospitals and on the road—to stay in constant contact easily, and to use their time most effectively to provide improved patient care. By taking advantage of the integrated voice-mail capability in Microsoft Unified Communications solution, caregivers can now retrieve voice mail and e-mail over the telephone. Finally, healthcare providers at Eastern Health are able to locate medical personnel much more effectively than with e-mail thanks to presence management.

Having a voice in the future
Eastern Health is testament to the benefits that Unified Communications can deliver to today’s healthcare organisations, but there is great potential for healthcare organisations to empower caregivers to collaborate and communicate with one another to provide safer, higher-quality, more accessible care to patients. Do not be surprised if one day soon a doctor who has ordered a critical lab test for a patient will be able to call the lab's computer and receive a voice transmission of the results. The marketplace and good patient care will demand no less.