Pulsara Blog

You chose this career.

Why?

Why did you go into public safety? Why did you go into healthcare? Why did you choose your specialty?

There are a number of possible reasons: Money. Prestige. Honor. Love. Fear. Anger. Hope. Adrenaline. Desire. Pressure. People.

Many of us in public safety and healthcare are just wired differently — especially those of us who deal with time sensitive emergencies. Imagine a group of people witnessing an emergency - a house fire, a car crash, a mass casualty event, a cardiac arrest, a sudden collapse, a STEMI, a stroke. If you were to watch their responses, you would see three types of people:

1. Those who run towards the mayhem.
2. Those who run away.
3. Those who stand still and watch.

Is your job in healthcare to focus on and serve only the patient or is it also to serve others on the TEAM who are caring for the patient?

Patient centric healthcare as we currently practice it is a failed philosophy. We focus on serving the patient for a finite moment in time even though the patient's journey extends well beyond our specific tasks.

In this mindset, we have a system where we — yes, you and I — cause 400,000 deaths per year and 10,000 serious medical complications every day, costing the U.S. an estimated one trillion dollars a year. Additionally, 80% of these errors occur secondary to miscommunication during transitions of care.

Patient centric healthcare is not enough.  We need to realize that just serving the patient is not enough — we ALSO need to serve the fellow clinicians who are serving the patient. We need patient- and people-centric healthcare.

If you've been following our blog for any amount of time now, you've heard us refer to the "communication crisis" in healthcare. Occasionally, those of us who work for Pulsara have the opportunity to experience first-hand how the crisis impacts care teams and their patients. This is part one of two posts on an up-close-and-personal encounter I had just last week. I hope you enjoy!

On a recent business trip, I was hospitalized and had to have surgery. I chose the hospital on the suggestion of my Uber driver, since neither hospital in town was a customer of ours, and I really knew nothing about either.  The experience that followed gave a perfect example of how miscommunication mixed with a lack of accountability can have a negative impact on patients.

Physician collaboration is associated with fewer patient deaths, readmissions, and emergency room visits.

A study of patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) found that when physicians collaborated more, patients had a 24 percent lower rate of emergency room visits and hospital readmissions, and a 28 percent lower rate of death.[10]

**This post is an excerpt from our eBook, "It's About Time: Addressing the Communication Crisis in Emergency Medicine." Download the full eBook here!**

Physician groups that worked more closely together in caring for patients who underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) procedures were able to produce better patient outcomes, according to recent research.[11] The study examined claims data for 251,630 patients who underwent CABG between 2008 and 2011; the patients received care from 466,243 physicians across more than a thousand health systems. At 60 days post-procedure, patients treated by physician teams with higher levels of cooperation had:

Communication and operational changes at hospitals, and within EMS systems, play key role in recent drop in the death rate from heart attacks. 

Although heart disease is still the number one killer of American adults, in recent years the nation has witnessed a dramatic decrease in the death rate from heart attacks. From 2003 to 2013, the rate at which people in the U.S. died from heart disease dropped 38%.[7]

**This post is an excerpt from our eBook, "It's About Time: Addressing the Communication Crisis in Emergency Medicine." Download the full eBook here!**

This striking improvement can be attributed to a number of factors, including more effective treatments for heart disease and risk factors like high cholesterol and high blood pressure. In addition, fewer people are smoking these days. And notably, some hospitals have made sweeping changes in how they treat people having heart attacks. Many of those changes have not involved new drug therapies or procedures, but simply operational shifts that address patient flow and provider communication.

Research suggests that medical errors play an even bigger role in preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals than previously estimated, and 80 percent of all serious medical errors involve miscommunication. That amounts to 250,000 - 400,000 deaths every year in the U.S. Tools that help medical professionals communicate more quickly, accurately, and collaboratively are critical to saving lives. 

More than fifteen years ago, the Institute of Medicine released a groundbreaking report on the incidence of medical errors in U.S. hospitals. The report suggested as many as 98,000 people die every year from medical errors.[1] Recent analysis from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says that report may have significantly underestimated the problem, putting the actual number closer to 250,000 - 400,000.[2] In fact, medical error is now considered the third leading cause of death in the U.S.

As an emergency room physician, I experience firsthand the impact of outdated communication systems — how they hamper good patient care and challenge even the most talented, dedicated, and well-trained medical professionals. In emergency situations, when seconds count, fast and accurate communication between care teams can mean the difference between life and death.

When it comes to communication in healthcare, do you ever feel like you're playing a game of "telephone?"

One of the most challenging aspects of living in the technological age is the speed of change. There was once a day when the person armed with the most knowledge and information had the upper hand. That's not the case in today's world. Instead, the person or company that can rapidly learn and adjust to changing trends, information, and technology will now lead the pack. Your ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world will be the one skill that separates you from your competition.

Imagine this: It's a busy Saturday evening at the hospital. You are understaffed and overworked and it's one of those days where everything seems to be happening at once. The medics bring in a patient suspected of having a STEMI. You know that when time is tissue, every second counts, so you follow proper protocol and, when you need to consult the cardiologist, Dr. Smith, you simply send him a page and continue on with your seemingly endless list of tasks and patients that need your attention.