Pulsara Blog

COVID-19 has taught us quite a bit about our current methods for communicating in a crisis. Whether you are currently experiencing a COVID-19 surge, are anticipating your next surge, or are catching up from your last surge, there is no doubt about one thing: the past two years have exposed many of the flaws in our system. There is good news, though. Now that we can pinpoint, identify, and examine some of the flaws, we have a clear path toward some new ways that we can set ourselves up for success in the future. 

Over the course of the pandemic, we’ve seen firsthand the results of our current systems. We now know that very few are truly prepared for all hazards and stress events. 

Editor's Note: This article was originally posted on Becker's Hospital Review under the title "From communication silos to unified communication: 4 takeaways on a new system for improving the patient journey."

The traditional patient journey is plagued by communication silos. Multiple healthcare providers are involved in a patient's care from start to finish, but many times they don't have the tools needed to communicate effectively with each other. Pulsara enables unified communication that dismantles these silos, providing a single source of truth between disparate care teams that improves emergency care coordination.

In a November webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review, Joey Branton, Pulsara's Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, discussed the silos in healthcare communication and described how Pulsara's solution provides improved networked communication with a system of care that scales.

Here are four key takeaways from the presentation:

The Evolution of “STRAUMA”: Using Innovation and Technology to Improve Trauma and Stroke Patient Care 

Not unlike other trauma centers, one of UCHealth Memorial Hospital Central's top mechanisms of injury is geriatric ground-level falls. As part of their Trauma performance improvement process, they identified an opportunity with relation to this population in which both Trauma and Stroke alerts were required. While they had their Trauma and Stroke alerts dialed in, they realized they still had a problem: their communication systems were not as fast or efficient as they could be when dealing with patients that needed coordinated care from both the Trauma and Stroke teams. They saw an opportunity to streamline alerts and coordination of care for those types of patients.

Presented by the American Trauma Society, with speakers Heather Finch, MSN, RN, CEN, TCRN, Manager of Trauma Services at UCHealth Memorial Hospital Central in Colorado Springs, CO along with moderator Kate Leatherby, Regional Vice President - West at Pulsara, learn how UCHealth turned all of that around with a little bit of innovation and technology. UCHealth Memorial Hospital Central has improved efficiency, eliminated phone calls to multiple people, and created a novel “STRAUMA” alert (Trauma + Stroke) with dual team notification and response for improved patient care and team coordination. 

Webinar Event Details

Date: Thursday, November 11th, 2021

Time: 1:00 PM EDT | 12:00 PM CDT | 11:00 AM MDT | 10:00 AM PDT

Cost: FREE

Webinar Host: American Trauma Society

The Future-Proof Health System: How Dismantling Communication Siloes Can Support Better Care Delivery Today and Tomorrow

In the largest pandemic of our lifetime, learn how healthcare leaders are using a unified communication and logistics platform to not only manage the COVID-19 crisis, but also lay the foundation for a new reality in healthcare—including the dismantling of communication silos between disparate care teams, single source of truth patient care coordination, and systems of care that scale.

Presented by Joey Branton, Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Pulsara, this presentation will provide tangible takeaways that you can apply to your own organization.

Editor's Note: The following post is adapted from a presentation Dr. James Woodson recently gave at the Arab Health Conference in Dubai on June 24th, 2021 entitled "Enabling Networked Communication: How Innovations in Mobile Technology Can Be Leveraged For Better Quality Of Care." Though the content was specifically tailored for conference attendees, the principles Dr. Woodson shares apply to healthcare systems worldwide. (Watch the full presentation here, or check out Part 1 and Part 3 of our blog coverage.)

Poor communication in healthcare is an ongoing issue around the world. Miscommunication costs over $1.7 billion in the U.S. alone each year, causes 80% of serious medical errors during transitions of care, and contributes greatly to preventable deaths. 

When we look for the root cause of the problem, it's actually pretty simple: disconnected human work.

There's a brand new industry on the rise that revolves around the concept of the connected worker. Connected worker platforms started in manufacturing, and are starting to move into other industries. The basic idea behind them is to use a combination of hardware, network, and software tools to enable frontline workers to communicate with supervisors or fellow employees who are in another location. 

I think there is a lot that healthcare can learn from these types of platforms. We should be looking at the concept of the connected provider: a healthcare provider who navigates their environment and communicates with other team members through connective technologies. Mobile technology can enable clinicians to ask questions and share information with the right team member at the right time, empowering them to act on behalf of each individual patient within their broader system. 

Editor's Note: The following post is adapted from a presentation Dr. James Woodson recently gave at the Arab Health Conference in Dubai on June 24th, 2021 entitled "Enabling Networked Communication: How Innovations in Mobile Technology Can Be Leveraged For Better Quality Of Care." Though the content was specifically tailored for conference attendees, the principles Dr. Woodson shares apply to healthcare systems worldwide. (Watch the full presentation below or at this link, and check out Part 2 and Part 3 of our blog coverage.)

As a board-certified emergency physician, I practiced medicine for many years in several different areas of the United States. Through my clinical experience, I discovered that my passion was actually to focus on systems of care: How do you combine multiple different organizations, resources, and people together to quickly surround a patient and provide care for them?

For the past decade, I've been studying how to leverage mobile technology to be able to bring people together, and how to actually create a shared consciousness around a single patient event. 

Digital health is a massive, multi-faceted landscape. The current emphasis on chronic care management, health, and wellness is incredibly important—and as healthcare begins to decentralize, that's where the focus should be. However, my focus is on the acute care space and uniting care teams.

The acute care space usually serves patients that are often undifferentiated and have an unscheduled and unstructured need. When an event happens, how do they enter into the acute care system? How do we get the right patient to the right facility with the right resources at the right time?

New technology is often an exciting prospect. It's fun to experiment with, especially when it promises to help streamline a cumbersome process. But ultimately, the true test of technology is whether it actually improves the way you do things...and when it comes to technology in healthcare, how it helps you provide better care for your patients.  

So when a group of leading experts and clinicians in Victoria, Australia implemented Pulsara to improve communication between their care teams, they were curious about what the innovative new technology could do for them. But more importantly, they wanted to see what it could do for their patients.

Over the past few years, they have successfully developed a streamlined system for making sure everyone on the team has the right information at the right time. And, they're happy to report, their new system has helped them provide stellar care for their patients.

Change management is hard. Adopting new technology and new workflows can be an exciting process, but that process may also bring hesitance, skepticism, fear, and doubt. It's not easy to change the way you've always done things. 

So when a group of leading experts and clinicians in Victoria, Australia implemented new technology to improve communication between their care teams, they worked hard to make sure that everyone was on the same page. And it worked. They've seen a great deal of success with their strategies, and have successfully developed a streamlined system for making sure everyone on the team has the right information at the right time—a system that their teams now love. 

Patient care involves many moving parts, several teams, and a lot of people. How do you get everybody on the same page, especially when messages have to travel through multiple communication methods before they reach their intended recipient? How do you unite all the disparate teams involved in a patient's healthcare journey—from ambulance to emergency department to specialty teams—into one region-wide system of care? 

Over the last few years, a group of leading experts and clinicians in Victoria, Australia have implemented cutting-edge technology to improve communication between their care teams. They've seen a great deal of success with their strategies, and have developed a streamlined system for making sure everyone on the team has the right information at the right time.  

In this three-part series, you'll hear directly from them on their search for a solution, the results they've seen, and the advice they would offer other systems that want to build their own regional system of care. 

View the full webinar video discussion below, or read on for Part 1 of the full roundtable! (Part 2 and Part 3 can be accessed here.)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Cynthia Bradford Lencioni for writing today's blog post. You can connect with her on LinkedIn. 

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Imagine that you are a paramedic in a rural region who has been summoned by 999 dispatch to the scene of a home accident. All you know is that there is a patient with suspected burns who is counting on you to save his life. When you arrive on scene, you quickly determine that your patient is a young child of about eight years of age with third-degree burns on at least 20% of his body, including his upper torso and head. He is deteriorating rapidly into shock. Given the extent of his injuries, you realize that per protocol, he needs immediate transport to a burn centre. As your partner begins to start an IV, you radio the regional command centre to provide the patient’s status and urgently request critical-care transport via air ambulance. Precious seconds turn into minutes as you stand by waiting for a reply from the command centre with an ETA for the air ambulance team... 

With each new phase of the pandemic comes a new set of challenges, and each new need is significant. From COVID testing and new treatment protocols to contact tracing and mass vaccinations, we must concurrently address all these challenges before the nation can begin returning to a renewed sense of normalcy. Modernizing and mobilizing the tools our nation’s first responders – and those who support them – use is now imperative, as we combat the spread of COVID-19.

On Thursday, April 8, from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm MDT, join Pulsara's Vice President of National Accounts, Corey Ricketson, for the session "FirstNet: Tracing and Collaborative Care Coordination." In this session, Corey will discuss how Pulsara's healthcare communications platform is being used by emergency medical personnel to unite distributed teams, enable scalable networked communication, and coordinate patient movement across the continuum of patient care.

Click Here to Register for Free

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article originally appeared on EMS1.com. Special thanks to our guest author, Sarah Calams of EMS1 BrandFocus.

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In the past, the traditional way of thinking as a paramedic was often this: Get the patient in the rig and drive to the hospital as soon as possible to get the patient the care they need.

But what if the patient wasn’t being transported to the right facility?

Imagine: a paramedic recognizes on scene that they are treating a stroke victim. Their first thought is to get the patient to a hospital as quickly as possible. But what if the receiving hospital isn’t equipped or staffed appropriately to treat the patient?

“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.

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.

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? 

With state-of-the-art facilities and well-trained caregivers, St. Bernards’ cardiac teams were already achieving door-to-balloon (DTB) times well within the recommended guidelines for STEMI response. But that didn’t stop them from looking for ways to get even better.

“We have a lean process for STEMI response, but we needed a way to see the bigger picture for identifying areas we could improve,” said Lindsey Stacy, the hospital’s STEMI coordinator.

Longview Regional Medical Center (LRMC) has long had a well-designed and fully functioning process for identifying and rapidly treating STEMI patients. The hospital was meeting its goal of keeping door-to-reperfusion times under 60 minutes; as a result, patient outcomes were generally very good. Despite their satisfactory performance, the teams at LRMC believed they could reduce their treatment times even further to improve patient outcomes.

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.

Saint Mary’s Regional Health System is a Joint-Commission-accredited Level III Trauma Center, located in Russellville, Arkansas. The 170-bed hospital has delivered care to the River Valley community for the past 90 years, and alongside Pope County EMS since 1967.

Saint Mary’s and Pope County EMS have a long-standing relationship built on a shared value of putting patients first. As the only hospital and EMS agency serving their region, they together perform emergency response for 28,000 patients annually.