The Dangerous Effects of Ignoring the Interoperability of our Care Teams

"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.  

Communications in inter-facility consultations and transfers is broken and clinicians and patients suffer.

Receiving hospitals attempt to address the issue by implementing transfer centers, but their existing communication technologies do not allow us to quickly build a team and communicate about a patient. Dr. Leap's story is the perfect illustration of this problem.

Pulsara is a regional communication network that can instantly build and unite intra-facility clinicians with inter-facility and prehospital clinicians.  Any patient, any condition, any healthcare entity, any team or clinician. Create a dedicated patient channel, build a care team, and then communicate.

We spend so much time talking about interoperability of data, but the industry forgets to leverage modern technology to unite people - especially when the care team is made up of people from multiple different healthcare entities.  

This story perfectly captures the grave problem too many of us face every day. It's about PEOPLE.