Kinsie Clarkson

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, hearts are everywhere—heart decorations, heart candies, heart cards, even heart pancakes for the more creative sweethearts. But one of the most important hearts of all too often gets overlooked: Your heart (or your heart health, to be specific)! 

February is American Heart Month: a national event to raise awareness about heart disease and what you can do to decrease your risks. Heart disease is the #1 cause of death for Americans, killing over 650,000 people annually. It is responsible for 1 in 4 deaths in the U.S. each year, and one person dies every 36 seconds from cardiovascular disease (that's heart disease and stroke combined). And that's not just for older adults; heart disease is becoming more and more common in young adults, making it important to learn whether you might be at risk.

During time-sensitive emergencies, sharing data between EMS and the hospital is a vital part of patient care. EMS contacts the hospital via radio report to share information about the patient’s condition and vital signs, letting hospital staff know what to expect when the patient arrives on their doorstep. EMS and the hospital both comply with HIPAA guidelines, and sharing details about the patient’s condition is simply considered an essential part of providing the best possible care for that patient.

But once the patient has been admitted and EMS needs outcome data from the hospital, suddenly the information sharing process isn’t quite as clear. Many hospitals get nervous about the thought of sharing patient data or PHI with EMS agencies.

Why?

HIPAA.

This is part 3 of our blog series on the Top 5 Challenges in Rural Healthcare. Check out the other posts in this series here.

For rural healthcare providers, delivering high quality care means facing unique challenges that don’t come up in most urban settings. Many of these issues have only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well. Access to care, distance, connectivity, and financial hardship are only a few of the hurdles rural health has had to grapple with. 

In the United States, rural healthcare serves one-quarter of the nation’s population. Over the last few decades, special rules and regulations were created with the aim to help rural residents get better access to care. However, some of these regulations have become counterproductive, doing more harm than good for rural patient care. 

This is part 2 of our blog series on the Top 5 Challenges in Rural Healthcare. Check out the other posts in this series here.

From access issues to finding funding, rural healthcare faces a variety of unique challenges. As COVID-19 swept the nation, many of these challenges have only intensified. Chief among these challenges is covering the high costs associated with continuing operations.  

Recently, prominent rural healthcare authorities in Georgia and Colorado Springs sat down for exclusive interviews with Pulsara to weigh in on these challenges, as well as some of the innovative solutions they believe can help. 

In this 5-part blog series, we will explore each of the top 5 challenges that rural healthcare currently faces, and how new technology could be key to solving some of them. Today, we'll discuss the second major challenge: Funding. 

This week, Ontario officials announced a second, more stringent stay-at-home order in an attempt to help mitigate the recent surge of COVID-19 cases in the province.

"According to officials, there is a real threat that the province’s hospital system could collapse under the pressure."

Country backroads. Limited cell service. A population that is spread across great distances and often doesn’t have effective health insurance. For rural healthcare providers, delivering high quality care means facing unique challenges that don’t come up in most urban settings. 

To celebrate the 200th birthday of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, the World Health Organization (WHO) proclaimed 2020 as the Year of the Nurse and Midwife. 

And what a year it's been. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe. Nurses everywhere have spent 2020 working through exhaustion, the daily risk of being exposed to the virus, and the stress of risking their family's safety as well as their own. According to a new study conducted in the UK, nurses are experiencing high levels of burnout and depression, and 28% of NHS nurses are quitting within three years—a 50% increase since 2013.

Every year, The Joint Commission consults with industry experts and stakeholders to gather information about emergent issues in patient safety and care. From their findings, they release an annual report of their National Patient Safety Goals, tailored specifically for programs like Ambulatory Care, Hospitals, and Nursing Care Centers. According to the Joint Commission, these goals inform their "sentinel event alerts, standards and survey processes, performance measures, educational materials, and Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare projects."

Are you ready for the 3G network shutdown? 

By the end of 2020 (yes, that’s in just a few WEEKS!), Verizon is shutting down their 3G network—with other providers following suit in the near future. This means that any 3G modem you use for ECG transmission will need to be upgraded. 

But wait — why pay to upgrade hardware that will soon be obsolete again anyway? Why pay to transmit the ECG at all? 

Emergency Medical Services—EMS, for short—is a branch of healthcare, public health, and public safety that responds to calls for help, 24/7, in almost every community in our nation. EMS encompasses a number of different services and roles, providing vital lifesaving care for patients during times of emergency. There are around 1.05 million licensed EMS professionals across the U.S. and nearly 623,000 of these are EMTs, while over 268,000 are paramedics. 

Over the past five years, Brunei's number of stroke cases have increased by 57%, making stroke the country's fourth-highest cause of death—and the main cause of disabilities. Now, a study conducted over the past two years found that the average age of stroke patients in Brunei is decreasing.

“A 500-bed hospital loses more than $4 million annually as a result of communication inefficiencies.” — National Center for Biotechnology Information

There is a communication crisis in hospitals today, as doctors and nurses are forced to use pagers, fax machines, and other forms of outdated technology to communicate critical patient information. These old technologies don’t talk to each other, either — so your staff ends up spending hours every day collecting, repeating, recording, and re-recording information. From the routine consult to critical COVID-19 management, these kinds of workflows negatively affect patient outcomes and organizational efficiencies. That’s a lot of valuable time down the drain.

From bumpy back roads to the length of time it takes to travel to the doctor, rural healthcare faces a number of unique challenges. 

However, there are also rarely-highlighted advantages to rural care that make it some of the highest quality care a patient can receive. In an exclusive interview with Pulsara, Dr. Jean Sumner, the Dean of the School of Medicine at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, said, “I honestly believe that if you're in a rural community, you have the opportunity to get better healthcare than in the city.” 

What’s rural health’s secret?

Are you using old, non-patient-centric communication technologies like pagers or phone calls (or even WhatsApp) to solve present-day healthcare challenges? Do you ever wonder if there's a better way to connect your care teams? 

At the European Resuscitation Council Virtual Congress on Oct. 24, 2020, Greg Brown, RN, Pulsara's Western Regional Sales Manager, hosted an exclusive webinar exploring just that. In "Patient-Centric Emergency Medicine: Why Mobile Team Communication Across Healthcare Organizations is the New Standard," Greg discusses how to improve acute care team communication and patient outcomes by switching to mobile technology — and why it is imperative to inter-organizational success.

It's been a big year for large-scale emergencies. Hurricanes, floods, wildfires, a pandemic — and responding to all these disaster scenarios involves a great deal of preparation, practice, and planning. 

Recently, a panel of industry leaders and experts in EMS and emergency preparedness (including Pulsara's own CMO, Kris Kaull) got together for an exclusive fireside chat-symposium, hosted by HERE Technologies. The group talked about overcoming the obstacles of disaster preparedness and mitigation and how to build a culture of preparedness and cross-agency collaboration. As they discussed disaster mitigation for large scale public safety scenarios, they also touched on some of the latest technology that's helping to improve scenario planning. 

Read on for the top 6 takeaways, or watch the full webinar below.

Finding A Next-Generation Telehealth Plan Of Action For Your Hospital [Part 3]

Editor's note: This is the third installment in our series on Finding the Next-Generation Telehealth Plan of Action for Your Hospital. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 here. 

Before COVID-19 sent shockwaves through the healthcare community, telehealth only comprised a very small percentage of appointments for most hospitals. Almost overnight, hospitals realized that they needed a reliable platform for evaluating patients from a distance. The pandemic set in motion a mad scramble for a workable solution, and many hospitals reached for the first option they could find. 

Earlier this year, in the weeks before COVID-19 changed life and healthcare as we know it, Latrobe Regional Hospital near Melbourne, Australia, was busy laying the groundwork for a new communication system between their hospital teams and Ambulance Victoria. Over the course of the next few months, Latrobe was able to implement Pulsara for treating patients across multiple departments, including stroke, mental health, pediatrics, trauma—and most pressingly, COVID-19. 

A new study shows that every 15-minute decrease in door-to-needle time is linked to lower all-cause mortality. How can we work to reduce door-to-needle times?

When a neurologist utters the phrase "time is brain," the implication is that every minute counts in treating each stroke patient. A recent study is further confirming what stroke teams have known since 1993: efficient treatment is everything to better outcomes in stroke care. 

As lawmakers and physicians debate what to do about telehealth restrictions in the wake of COVID-19, a growing number of clinicians would like to see telehealth become a more regular part of patient care.

The motion to make telehealth permanent after the pandemic seems to be gaining momentum, both in Canada and the United States. Canadian physicians and researchers seem to agree that while it won’t solve everything, telehealth has the potential to help remedy a lot of problems in healthcare across the provinces.

Of all the various crises facing healthcare in 2020, there is one underlying root issue that directly affects all of them. It determines everything about every single patient's care journey, from each care decision to every patient outcome. 

However, very few healthcare professionals think to start with this issue in improving patient outcomes. 

What's the issue? 

Communication.