Solving the healthcare collaboration challenge
The past few years have seen an acceleration of changes related to digitalisation and mobility within the healthcare industry. A recent study showed that 80% of doctors use smartphones and medical applications to support them in the care delivery.
Most legacy collaboration solutions are not designed for the clinical environment, forcing healthcare professionals to turn to consumer messaging applications that facilitate communication but can compromise security. This raises a number of concerns, not least of which is that a critical healthcare function is being delivered across an unsecure medium, exposing the hospital to the risk of falling foul of privacy and compliance regulations.
The pager has been the mainstay of communication in hospitals over many years, yet it is gradually becoming obsolete. One of the last largescale users of pagers, the NHS in the UK, announced earlier this year that they will be phased out by 2021.
The challenge for IT is to deliver a collaboration environment that engages and empowers the healthcare professionals, enabling them to deliver timely and efficient care, without compromising security and compliance.
Any solution to the collaboration challenges faced by healthcare organizations has to fulfill a number of key criteria:
- Secure: The healthcare industry faces significant challenges and risks in its information security strategies, further amplified by vulnerable legacy IT systems, tight budgets and immense workforce numbers. According to a recent study, healthcare organizations experience more than three times the number of security incidents than the average industry. At the same time, a survey published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine indicated that only 27% of organizations had implemented a secure messaging application, and a mere 7% of clinicians were using a hospital-issued messaging application.
- Flexible: More effective communication enables doctors and nurses to devote more time to patients. Real-time communication with cross-departmental teams and access to information will reduce the time wasted on administrative tasks, allowing caregivers to deliver better patient care. With patient’s wellbeing on the line, collaboration needs to be instantaneous and available across locations and devices to enable better standards of care.
- Efficient: With systems like pagers being decommissioned over the next few years, healthcare organizations look for a solution that can offer a higher level of communication efficiency in a more feature-rich fashion. At the core of this is replacing a one-way-messaging tool with an application that facilitates true collaboration through integration with an organization’s directory of contacts, to ease communication with anyone in the healthcare ecosystem.
Healthcare professionals can now access information, or better collaborate with teams within and from another ward in real-time. When this integration is delivered at an API level, it ensures that the information is shared seamlessly between systems and devices. This allows hospitals to extend collaboration beyond the boundaries of the facility and enables all members of the clinical staff - even non-resident physicians - to be reached through an app on their smartphone.
We’ve partnered with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise to create Healthcare Connect, combining our consultancy, technical and managed services with Alcatel-Lucent Rainbow ™ to transform the clinical collaboration and revolutionize patient care. Healthcare Connect is designed to enable better care and improve the patient experience.
Through Healthcare Connect, doctors, nurses and other care givers can keep track of presence status, share patient information, research materials, plan meetings, and message each other or broadcast information in real-time. Fully cloud-based and able to deliver a wide range of communications and collaboration capabilities, Healthcare Connect is tailored to address the needs of hospitals and other medical service providers.
To learn more about Healthcare Connect, visit https://connect.hello.global.ntt/healthcare_connect Healthcare connect
