Pulsara Blog

Change is hard for everyone. Very few people truly enjoy the process of changing the way things have always been done. As a result, establishing a new way of doing things can be an unpopular decision.

So what do you do when change is necessary? How do you make sure it's successful? Change is hard enough to enact across a single organization. How do you create successful change when it's necessary across your region? 

These are questions that healthcare leaders from Colorado Springs, Colorado and Des Moines, Iowa have recently grappled with. The Colorado Springs and Des Moines regions have a striking number of similarities. Both serve a population of around 700,000, have three health systems, and account for around forty EMS agencies. Both have also revolutionized their regional communication with Pulsara, which has allowed them to enable faster, better communication for their healthcare providers. 

Leaders from both regions recently hosted a webinar to share their challenges and successes in bringing a new communication system into their region, and what they learned in the process. Watch the full webinar below, and check out these six takeaways for anyone considering how to approach change management across a region.

How Healthcare Leaders are Successfully Connecting Teams & Organizations Across Regions for Better Outcomes

Increasingly, more healthcare organizations are discovering the need for an interconnected system of care that includes local and regional healthcare systems—from EMS to hospital teams and beyond. The benefits to patient care and clinical coordination are profound, from faster treatment times and reduced costs to streamlined transfers and unified MCI/MPI and disaster management.

But with so many different systems and stakeholders, how does one go about setting up a regional system of care that scales? How do you engage and get buy-in from a diverse group of stakeholders?

In this upcoming webinar, learn firsthand how healthcare leaders from Colorado Springs, CO, and Des Moines, IA, successfully created interconnected regional systems of care based around Pulsara: a secure, mobile-first telehealth, communication, and logistics platform.

Hear how they successfully brought stakeholders from multiple organizations together, what challenges they faced and how they overcame them, tips and best practices, change management insights and discoveries, and more. 

WEBINAR EVENT DETAILS

Date: Tuesday, May 17th, 2022 

Time: 12:00 PM ET | 11:00 AM CT | 10:00 AM MT | 9:00 AM PT

Cost: FREE

Chaos is woven into the DNA of emergent care. Emergency care professionals face the unknown around every corner—from supporting a low acuity patient to managing a mass casualty event. You never know what you’re going to get. 

Sometimes, you have a day that’s more chaotic than others. Other times, the chaos lasts much longer than a day—it can become a lasting situation that extends into months and even years. Few seasons have been quite as chaotic as the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID has tested and tried our healthcare systems to the breaking point, introducing factors like virus spikes, hospitalization surges, burnout, and staffing shortages. 

To keep growing, keep improving, and keep adapting to the situation, some things will need to change. The problem is, it seems impossible to do anything about the situation while you’re treading water. It can feel like trying to bail out a rowboat as you continue to paddle—trying to do everything all at the same time. But if you can introduce a change that will help either paddle the boat or bail with less effort, the time and energy it takes to implement that change will ultimately help make the job easier for the long term. 

Change management is something I learned about during the course of my academic adventures, and at the time, it made a lot of sense. I could think of numerous examples of both failures and successes in change management that I had observed or been directly involved in during the span of my professional career. My studies had armed me with some valuable knowledge of different change management frameworks and ways to overcome and navigate process and people challenges. But I had never had a chance to apply my acquired skills in such a dramatic way until I started working at Pulsara.  

One of the first things I remember hearing about when I started at Pulsara was: “We have a saying here: change is 5% the technology, 15% process, and 80% about people.”

Most advice on becoming an effective leader is geared—maybe not surprisingly—toward the things we can change about ourselves. We focus our attention on asking ourselves, “Do I have the right values, the right traits, the right competencies, or even the right style to be a good leader?” 

While those questions are important, we sometimes forget that the environment you create for your team makes just as much, if not more, of an impact. From asking questions to listening to their team members, an effective leader is attuned to their environment and fosters an atmosphere where their coworkers are safe to grow and learn. 

Change can be like traveling to a different country and driving on the opposite side of the road.

In January of this year, I was afforded the opportunity to travel to Australia to work with a new client and bring them on to our platform. I made sure I had all of my travel documents, a comfortable neck pillow for the 15-hour flight, and plenty of movies downloaded on my iPad. When we landed in Melbourne, I was all smiles as I experienced what an amazing country Australia is for the first time. My co-worker asked if I minded driving first, and I said not at all. I opened the door on the left side of the SUV to get in, and to my surprise, there was no steering wheel. Yup, in Australia, you sit on the right side of the vehicle and drive on the left side of the road—the opposite of what I'm used to in the United States.

GROWING UP IS HARD.

As a young industry, EMS had its cute years. We were the baby of the family. Our oldest brother, Police, followed Mom and Dad’s orders to a T. Police was a rule-following perfectionist who aimed to please. Then, there was the middle child, Firefighter. She was similar to her brother, following in his footsteps and enjoying the attention of being the baby of the family ... until we came along. Then, she started taking on a new role – differentiating herself from her older brother while at the same time, nurturing us.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Alyana Samai is the Director of Stroke Services at West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero, Louisiana. Aly has been a champion user of Pulsara since 2016, and has led her teams to successfully decrease door to needle times by streamlining and improving communication when it matters most. 

Dear Aly,

We are new clients and implementing Pulsara at our facility, but many of our nurses are concerned that this is going to be "double documentation," more than communication. How can we help them understand that Pulsara can streamline the process, reduce communication frustrations, and not double up on tasks?

Sincerely, 
Prepared for Pulsara

EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to our guest blogger, Lee Varner. Lee is the Director of the Center for Patient Safety, and has over 20 years of experience in transformational leadership and patient safety to provide consultation and educational services for improving performance effectiveness, quality initiatives, healthcare best practices, culture training and patient safety strategies. 

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Recently, I was part of a conversation with a group of EMS leaders who were talking about clinical errors. They discussed the different types of clinical errors that they have seen and which ones kept them up at night. A few offered examples where a medication error or airway event harmed patient.   

I was happy to hear that everyone realized that most adverse events were usually part of system failure and not just caused by a reckless EMT or paramedic. Furthermore, everyone agreed that EMS clinicians are competent, compassionate, and dedicated people who don’t show up for duty expecting to harm a patient. But when harm does reach a patient, it affects everyone: the patient, family, the EMT or paramedic, and the entire agency. There was no disagreement that harm from medical errors was affecting everyone involved, but the nagging question was, how to reduce those errors? 

Did you miss last week's blog that introduced a model for managing complex change? Check it out here!

It seems simple: just download the Pulsara app from the App Store or Google Play store, and voilà! We've reduced communication errors, decreased door to balloon times, and we given our stroke patients a better chance at an improved quality of life after their recovery. It's that simple, right?

Not so fast ... the technology is only about 5% of the solution. Process workflows account for another 15%. But 80% of successfully implementing the Pulsara platform is about PEOPLE!

Think about it -- something as seemingly simple as asking a paramedic to use an app on their smartphone actually requires a significant change in their current process. And, it's a process that they've been repeating their whole careers, multiple times a day. Considering that, it's no wonder teams can be resistant to change! So how can you alleviate this fear of change and get your people on board? Read on!

A perfect implementation of change doesn't exist, though if you read my colleague's blog from last week about change management, you're well equipped with a framework that Team Pulsara has seen great success following. You've seen that change management is possible. But even with this framework, you'll undoubtedly still encounter challenges from within. Below are ten actionable tips to help you implement change successfully in your organization.

Having been in EMS now for 19 years, I have noticed one thing among the medical community: some medical providers are very interested in advancements in technology and improvements in patient care outcomes, but only as long as it does not require them to change or increase their workload.

As technology has continued to evolve, I hear “Wow, that is great, but it is just another thing for me to do.” or “I already have too much.” Even if it is the best thing for the patient, you will still typically hear the staff concerns.

The more reluctant members of the medical team tend to bring up roadblocks for why their teams can't do things a certain way, or why changing technologies will not work for them. For example, when working to implement Pulsara in our region, we hear concerns about how it's just one more tablet and application to have to use, despite the fact that statistics show that Pulsara decreases time significantly and ultimately improves the patient outcome.