James Woodson, MD

Editor's Note: The following post is adapted from a presentation Dr. James Woodson recently gave at the Arab Health Conference in Dubai on June 24th, 2021 entitled "Enabling Networked Communication: How Innovations in Mobile Technology Can Be Leveraged For Better Quality Of Care." Though the content was specifically tailored for conference attendees, the principles Dr. Woodson shares apply to healthcare systems worldwide. Watch the full presentation below, or check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our blog coverage.

If you're looking to build a communication and logistics system that can scale to meet your needs, you'll need a strong infrastructure built on the right kind of technology. There are many different types of solutions out there, from platforms that have been built specifically to cover certain parts of the care process to popular platforms that weren't even designed for healthcare at all. 

So the key question is: What are the traits of a system that will scale to meet your needs, no matter what kind of situation is thrown at it?

As the founder and CEO of Pulsara, I've spent a lot of time researching, experimenting, and observing what works and what doesn't. Here are 8 things I've learned to look for in a communication and logistics solution that can meet your organization's needs, no matter the scale of the situation. 

Editor's Note: The following post is adapted from a presentation Dr. James Woodson recently gave at the Arab Health Conference in Dubai on June 24th, 2021 entitled "Enabling Networked Communication: How Innovations in Mobile Technology Can Be Leveraged For Better Quality Of Care." Though the content was specifically tailored for conference attendees, the principles Dr. Woodson shares apply to healthcare systems worldwide. (Watch the full presentation here, or check out Part 1 and Part 3 of our blog coverage.)

Poor communication in healthcare is an ongoing issue around the world. Miscommunication costs over $1.7 billion in the U.S. alone each year, causes 80% of serious medical errors during transitions of care, and contributes greatly to preventable deaths. 

When we look for the root cause of the problem, it's actually pretty simple: disconnected human work.

There's a brand new industry on the rise that revolves around the concept of the connected worker. Connected worker platforms started in manufacturing, and are starting to move into other industries. The basic idea behind them is to use a combination of hardware, network, and software tools to enable frontline workers to communicate with supervisors or fellow employees who are in another location. 

I think there is a lot that healthcare can learn from these types of platforms. We should be looking at the concept of the connected provider: a healthcare provider who navigates their environment and communicates with other team members through connective technologies. Mobile technology can enable clinicians to ask questions and share information with the right team member at the right time, empowering them to act on behalf of each individual patient within their broader system. 

Editor's Note: The following post is adapted from a presentation Dr. James Woodson recently gave at the Arab Health Conference in Dubai on June 24th, 2021 entitled "Enabling Networked Communication: How Innovations in Mobile Technology Can Be Leveraged For Better Quality Of Care." Though the content was specifically tailored for conference attendees, the principles Dr. Woodson shares apply to healthcare systems worldwide. (Watch the full presentation below or at this link, and check out Part 2 and Part 3 of our blog coverage.)

As a board-certified emergency physician, I practiced medicine for many years in several different areas of the United States. Through my clinical experience, I discovered that my passion was actually to focus on systems of care: How do you combine multiple different organizations, resources, and people together to quickly surround a patient and provide care for them?

For the past decade, I've been studying how to leverage mobile technology to be able to bring people together, and how to actually create a shared consciousness around a single patient event. 

Digital health is a massive, multi-faceted landscape. The current emphasis on chronic care management, health, and wellness is incredibly important—and as healthcare begins to decentralize, that's where the focus should be. However, my focus is on the acute care space and uniting care teams.

The acute care space usually serves patients that are often undifferentiated and have an unscheduled and unstructured need. When an event happens, how do they enter into the acute care system? How do we get the right patient to the right facility with the right resources at the right time?

This 5-part blog series is based on the webinar “The Next-Gen Communication and Telehealth Plan of Action for Your Hospital.” Watch the corresponding section of the webinar below, or listen to the full webinar here. 

Telehealth and telemedicine have gone through dramatic changes over the last four months, far more than many of us dreamed possible. Regulations and reimbursement are evolving rapidly, which has opened up the door to many new opportunities for using telehealth. Telehealth is helping us improve both the quality and the value of the care that we deliver to our communities. 

However, all this change will almost certainly have wide-reaching implications for your health system, especially in the acute care space. Over the next five posts in this series, we’ll discuss the rapidly shifting landscapes of telehealth regulations and reimbursement and how you can navigate them. We’ll also dive into some of the questions surrounding how to best leverage telehealth in the acute care space.

I recently read an article that interviewed doctors from San Francisco who volunteered to work on the front lines of the pandemic in New York. They warn that while many states are reopening and life seems in some ways to be returning to normal, it can be easy to forget that COVID-19 is still spreading and still deadly. Pandemic fatigue is setting in, but the fight is far from over. 

Most healthcare systems have telehealth capabilities for scheduled patients, but often struggle with telehealth solutions for unscheduled and acute care. Pulsara PATIENT provides a HIPAA-compliant solution for provider-to-patient or provider-to-provider live video calls, so your facility can convert unscheduled audio calls into billable telemedicine calls.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen health systems adopt mobile communication solutions faster than ever before. But your teams shouldn’t implement just any solution that will only work for what you need right now. 

What about after the pandemic when HIPAA regulations are tightened again? Will your solution not only allow you to connect your internal hospital teams, but also with teams from other organizations on one secure channel? Does your CC&C solution or your telehealth solution allow you to communicate throughout the ENTIRE patient event? Or does it send a blast alert and then leave your teams to their own devices (literally), communicating once again with pagers, faxes, and audio-only phone calls? 

Pulsara works for ANY patient event, and connects your entire care team, INCLUDING those outside your own facility, on a secure platform for a single source of truth. And, Pulsara will continue to serve your critical care needs long after COVID-19 goes away.

We learn more about COVID-19 as well as our Systems of Care every ... single ... day.

Many are trying to patch together quick solutions and are grateful for the relaxation of HIPAA and other telemedicine regulations, but what is your Post-COVID (round 1) plan? 

Pulsara's COVID-19 package is 100% free and is flexible enough to accommodate any facility type, resources available, and specific COVID-19 management goals. This flexibility is what makes Pulsara so powerful, but sometimes we need to start by solving one problem at a time. 

As COVID-19 continues to spread, hospital resources are becoming more scarce. Limiting patient transfers between facilities can help ease strain on resources as well as reduce clinician and community exposure to the virus. 

But sometimes, patient transfers are clinically necessary. In those cases, time and efficiency of communications are key as hospitals strive to keep up with increasing patient volume and clinical demand. Instead of making multiple audio-only phone calls to complete a transfer, with Pulsara, facilities can communicate via live video calls, photos, messaging, and more. 

As our communities work to flatten the curve, our public safety and healthcare system must work to mitigate the surge of patients who are infected, or who think they might be infected, to our hospitals to preserve resources and contain the spread of COVID-19. 

Using Pulsara's flexible and free COVID-19 package, clinicians can teletriage patients to the most appropriate location, or ideally, stop the case without transporting: 

I recently read an interesting review on a very important topic in healthcare: DIVERSION. The article reviews how the state of Massachusetts banned the practice of busy hospitals diverting patients coming in via EMS to other facilities, and the long-lasting impacts of that ban.

According to a recent article in HealthcareITNews, "While structured clinical notes in the electronic health record have obvious value, ... research [published] in JAMIA suggests that real-world data captured in unstructured notes offers more accuracy when trained algorithms are used to mine it."

I've been asked why Pulsara started building a Regional Communication Network for Time Sensitive Emergencies. Here is one of the many reasons...

Misdiagnosis-related harms (death and disability) are concentrated in Vascular Events, Infections, and Cancers. The numbers in this study are staggering, but keep in mind that malpractice claims only represent 1.5% of actual events, and it is estimated that total societal costs are more than $100 billion annually.

According to a recent article published in Forbes, "The move to population health and away from fee-for-service medicine is working to the detriment of U.S. hospitals, a new report from Fitch Ratings indicates.

It's amazing what we can do when we work together as a TEAM.  

Below is a fantastic video featuring a couple of our partners working together to improve patient outcomes: Singing River Health System and Acadian Ambulance Service.

The fact that these teams achieved an 8 minute D2B time is PHENOMENAL.  Kudos to the entire care team. Watch how they did it below!

A few weeks ago, we published a blog introducing the concept of the Internet of Lifesaving People, where we discussed the importance of arming our healthcare teams with the right tools to empower them -- the clinicians -- to deliver optimal care through integrated, precise communication. This week, we wanted to explain how Pulsara fits into this concept. 

Pulsara’s purpose is to improve the lives of patients and caregivers through innovative communication. We’ve helped create the Internet of Lifesaving People, which has been used to help coordinate regional care teams for thousands and thousands of patients across the United States and Australia.

"Number of patients seen per shift isn't the only metric that matters. Transfers, sending and receiving, are complicated, dangerous, and extraordinarily time-consuming. This is especially so in small hospitals with little or no backup. When physicians and nurses are on the phone and at the desk completing the tomes needed for a transfer, they can't see sick people." - Dr. Edwin Leap

Dr. Leap's unfortunate story of a transfer that took six hours for a non-responsive, pregnant woman with stroke-like symptoms happens thousands of times every day. I have been on both sides of the equation and each side is equally frustrating.  

$23.8 billion has flowed into the digital health industry over the last 7 years.

But more often than not, tech startups focus more on dollars than on people impacted by their services. That's why -- according to a feature recently published in Fierce Healthcare, Rock Health has launched The Impact Project. The initiative aims to bring to light the stories of real people who have been touched by healthcare technology. 

Recently, the AHA released recommendations that cardiac resuscitation systems of care be put in place and should involve "interconnected community, emergency medical services, and hospital efforts to measure and improve the process of care and outcome for patients with cardiac arrest."