Have you ever had to coordinate care for a really sick patient that needed an immediate transfer or consult, and had to divert your attention away from the patient in order to get in touch with all the necessary team members? Have you ever been frustrated by just how much time and runaround it takes to get everyone on the same page? 

Physical distance is part of the package when you’re trying to coordinate care for patients. Whether you’re down the hallway or miles apart, getting the right information to the right people at the right time can be a challenge. That’s why having clear, established lines of communication is vital to successfully coordinating patient care.

Imagine: you need to see your doctor's notes from your last appointment, so you put in a request to view your clinical notes. Shortly afterward, all the information you need shows up in an app on your smartphone.

Wouldn't it be nice to have such easy access to your electronic health records? 

New York Hospital Improves Communication and Door-to-Needle Times with Pulsara

Just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, care teams at Mount St. Mary’s Hospital in Lewiston, New York realized that they needed a better way to communicate. According to an article published recently in a local Lewiston news source, Mount St. Mary’s chose to adopt Pulsara in order to open better lines of communication between EMS and emergency department staff.

Pulsara is a mobile-first telehealth and communication platform that connects teams across organizations. Through the use of mobile technology, Pulsara allows every member of the care team —from medics to nurses to physicians — to communicate on one dedicated channel for each patient. And for stroke patients at Mount St. Mary’s Regional Stroke Center, more efficient care team communication can have a major impact.

Even if you aren’t a diehard NASCAR fan, you’ve likely still heard the same champion names over and over. But it might surprise even dedicated fans to learn that all of the cars on the track are limited to the same top speed and horsepower range. With this being the case, how can it be that there is such a large disparity between first and last place? The answer is that the race is won and lost during the pit stop!

During the longer races, drivers will make up to a dozen pit stops. Instead of victory being about having the fastest speed down the stretch, it’s more about identifying bottlenecks and delays while eliminating mistakes.

As our processes and equipment in EMS continue to evolve, they empower first responders to provide better care for patients. But in order to provide the BEST care, our communication technologies must also evolve and keep pace. 

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of having to repeat the radio report for the umpteenth time, or worse, watched harm reach your patient because of a simple miscommunication, picture this instead:

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we strive to improve the lives of ED Nurses and the patients they serve. This week, I want to focus on ED Doctors (did you know Pulsara was founded by one?). In this post, my aim is to help ED Doctors understand how a communication platform like Pulsara can make their lives better.

Miami Valley Hospital, part of Premier Health, was recently featured on the news for their implementation of both the RAPID stroke imaging platform and Pulsara's communication platform. 

"When patients come in to the hospital after having a stroke, there's a lot of information that needs to get collected, and a lot of people are part of the team that collects that information," said Dr. John Terry, Director of Inpatient Stroke Care at Premier Health. "Pulsara allows all those people to be able to communicate and know what everyone else is doing at the same time." Dr. Terry says that that transparency and ease of communication has changed the hospital's stroke treatment protocols in a "very beneficial way."

Pulsara recently partnered with Rea Berg, Virginia Mason Medical Center's Director of the Emergency Department/Observation Unit to present some of the successes the hospital has seen in their treatment times following some process improvements they made. The full webinar can be seen right here. 

Following the webinar, Becker's Healthcare Review wrote up the following article about the presentation. The following is authored by Anuja Vaidya, and originally appeared here. 

One of the biggest contributors to inefficiency in healthcare is a lack of communication, which can lead to lower quality of care and higher costs. Communication in healthcare is siloed for many reasons, including the complexity of the work, the size of health systems, outdated and non-integrated communication technologies, and HIPAA constraints.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 9, 2019

CONTACT
Hannah Ostrem
Hannah.Ostrem@pulsara.com
(877) 903-5642

The adoption by Pulsara of the NEMSIS format further strengthens its role as the leading regional healthcare communication platform.

BOZEMAN, Mont. — Pulsara announced today that the healthcare communication platform is the first to adopt the NEMSIS prehospital format to connect regional systems of care.

The purpose behind the National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS) is to enhance patient care by storing EMS data from local, state, and national sources. The NEMSIS database allows EMS providers to share, collect, standardize, and use this data to analyze their systems and make process improvements.

Through a standardized API, Pulsara’s platform now allows all ePCR partners to access Pulsara data in near real time. Importing Pulsara data via this new API using the NEMSIS 3.4 format eliminates dual data entry by medics and improves communication to all care providers, ultimately enhancing patient care.