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 light of the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare and EMS providers have found themselves relying on technology more than ever before.
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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With today’s advanced technology, anyone can use their smartphone, tablet, or computer to connect via real-time video to talk with anyone around the world.
Yet, in the healthcare system, video streaming has remained static, convoluted, and complicated.
“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crisis in hospitals today, as doctors and nurses are forced to use pagers, fax machines, and other forms of outdated technology to communicate critical patient information.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.
Editor's note: This is the third installment in our series on Finding the Next-Generation Telehealth Plan of Action for Your Hospital. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 here.
Before COVID-19 sent shockwaves through the healthcare community, telehealth only comprised a very small percentage of appointments for most hospitals. Almost overnight, hospitals realized that they needed a reliable platform for evaluating patients from a distance. The pandemic set in motion a mad scramble for a workable solution, and many hospitals reached for the first option they could find.
Earlier this year, in the weeks before COVID-19 changed life and healthcare as we know it, Latrobe Regional Hospital near Melbourne, Australia, was busy laying the groundwork for a new communication system between their hospital teams and Ambulance Victoria. Over the course of the next few months, Latrobe was able to implement Pulsara for treating patients across multiple departments, including stroke, mental health, pediatrics, trauma—and most pressingly, COVID-19.
As lawmakers and physicians debate what to do about telehealth restrictions in the wake of COVID-19, a growing number of clinicians would like to see telehealth become a more regular part of patient care.
The motion to make telehealth permanent after the pandemic seems to be gaining momentum, both in Canada and the United States. Canadian physicians and researchers seem to agree that while it won’t solve everything, telehealth has the potential to help remedy a lot of problems in healthcare across the provinces.
Of all the various crises facing healthcare in 2020, there is one underlying root issue that directly affects all of them. It determines everything about every single patient's care journey, from each care decision to every patient outcome.
However, very few healthcare professionals think to start with this issue in improving patient outcomes.
What's the issue?
Communication.
For Latrobe Regional Hospital (LRH) near Melbourne, Australia, streamlining communication has been a major area of focus, both to improve patient care and to strengthen collaboration across its healthcare system. Up until the beginning of 2020, they used a combination of phone calls and pagers to interface among Emergency Services, ED, and hospital staff—resulting in inefficiencies and challenging communication for caregivers.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Justin Baker for writing today's blog post. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
While the world has dealt with the far-reaching impacts of COVID-19, the healthcare community has had to deal with many unique challenges. Coming up with and implementing procedures to protect both patients and staff from possible exposure to the virus is a tricky process, especially when in some locations, hospitals have also been dealing with patient surges. Keeping up with routine scheduled visits and elective procedures then becomes even more difficult. As a result, telemedicine has become commonly used for patient care visits and follow up appointments.
In the largest pandemic of our lifetime, learn how clinical leaders in Colorado Springs, CO, are using mobile technology to not only manage the COVID-19 crisis, but also lay the foundation for the new reality of EMS, including 911-initiated telemedicine, Mobile Integrated Healthcare, Community Paramedicine, and telehealth. For the first time ever, the presenters will outline their modernized management system and share case studies and key takeaways that will help you improve patient care, upgrade team communication, reduce cost of care, and increase EMS agency and hospital revenue. Clinicians and thought leaders are creating a new path forward, based around the HIPAA-compliant, secure, mobile-first telehealth communication platform Pulsara.
What: 911-Initiated Telemedicine: How Colorado Springs, CO, Clinical Leaders Are Revolutionizing Emergency Medicine via Mobile Technology
When: Tuesday, Sept 8, 2020 | 1:00 pm EST / 12:00 pm CT / 11:00 am MT / 10:00 am PT
How: SIGN UP HERE
Keep reading to learn more!
Healthcare has long relied on pagers as the most secure, reliable way to communicate between clinicians. But new evidence suggests that this time-tested communication method may actually be causing HIPAA violations for unwitting hospitals.
Telehealth Communication Platform Honored for Improving Healthcare Delivery
BOZEMAN, Mont., Aug. 12, 2020 — Pulsara, the leading telehealth and communication platform that connects teams across organizations, announced today that the company has received a 2020 Telehealth Award from HealthTechZone.com, a leading healthcare technology news source. The award recognizes companies innovating and improving health delivery and management towards exceptional customer experiences.
Outdated technology is one of the major factors lurking behind miscommunication in healthcare. Pagers, fax machines, and radios still dominate care spaces, and are the primary method for transmitting important information from person to person. In every other sphere of life, mobile technology has long since replaced these outdated forms of communication—except in healthcare, where every second matters to each patient’s outcome.
Now, the UK's National Health Service has decided to change that.
Earlier this year, the NHS announced that they will require NHS trusts to replace pagers in UK hospitals by the end of 2021. “Every day, our wonderful NHS staff work incredibly hard in what can be challenging and high-pressured environments. The last thing they need are the frustrations of having to deal with outdated technology – they deserve the very best equipment to help them do their jobs,” said Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock.
This is part 2 of our 5-part blog series based on the webinar “The Next-Gen Communication and Telehealth Plan of Action for Your Hospital.” Check out part 1 here. Watch the corresponding section of the webinar below, or listen to the full webinar here.
Over the last four months, COVID-19 has forever changed the landscape of healthcare. Telehealth has experienced explosive growth since March, creating groundbreaking changes in telemedicine regulations and reimbursement opportunities. Prior to four months ago, only a small minority of systems utilized telehealth in beyond three to five percent of their appointments. Since the start of COVID-19, telehealth has grown to millions of claims in less than a few months. According to a published stat, the number of Medicare beneficiaries using telehealth services during the pandemic increased 11,700%.
Looking at a graph of telehealth’s "hockey stick" growth is astonishing. For many years, there was no substantial change. March 2020 marks the shift between the blue and red growth markers. Telehealth shot from near non-existence to millions of claims practically overnight.
This 5-part blog series is based on the webinar “The Next-Gen Communication and Telehealth Plan of Action for Your Hospital.” Watch the corresponding section of the webinar below, or listen to the full webinar here.
Telehealth and telemedicine have gone through dramatic changes over the last four months, far more than many of us dreamed possible. Regulations and reimbursement are evolving rapidly, which has opened up the door to many new opportunities for using telehealth. Telehealth is helping us improve both the quality and the value of the care that we deliver to our communities.
However, all this change will almost certainly have wide-reaching implications for your health system, especially in the acute care space. Over the next five posts in this series, we’ll discuss the rapidly shifting landscapes of telehealth regulations and reimbursement and how you can navigate them. We’ll also dive into some of the questions surrounding how to best leverage telehealth in the acute care space.
I grew up and lived most of my life in a very rural area. The majority of my EMS and ED nursing experience comes from rural settings, including a few years in a small critical access hospital. I was the only nurse in the 5-bed ER on night shift. We even locked all the doors to the hospital, and if someone presented to the ER for care, they had to ring a doorbell so I could let them in. No really—we did.
My, how times have changed with technology and medical advances. The recent COVID-19 crisis has affected virtually every healthcare professional in some form or fashion, and has potentially changed healthcare forever. Telemedicine has emerged to the forefront as a valuable option for providing care: both acute and chronic, in person, and remote. It’s gone from being a distant future option hidden behind miles of red tape to being one of the hottest topics in healthcare today.
As the summer progresses, more and more cities are experiencing a spike in their numbers of COVID-19 cases. The second wave of the coronavirus is closing in, which means that the remainder of this summer is vital. Now is the time to prepare for the challenges of the months ahead.
A new telehealth solution is an excellent way to plan ahead. Telehealth can greatly expand patient access to essential health services, ensuring that providers can continue to give them high quality care from a distance. Recently, the CDC came out with an article explaining how a secure telehealth solution can set a medical practice up for the best possible results in mitigating the spread of COVID-19.
With the sudden influx of telehealth communication platforms rising to meet needs during COVID-19, barriers to telemedicine have been breaking with record speed. Unfortunately, with the increased use of technology comes increased security risks—risks that leave patient information vulnerable to hackers.
Since COVID-19, phishing attempts and successes have increased significantly. In mid-April, Google saw more than 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19. The pandemic has changed our relationship with technology and how we operate on a day-to-day basis. Now, fewer people are suspicious about receiving a text that appears to come from a government agency or a trusted healthcare provider. And even in legitimate technological encounters between providers and patients, unsecured information can fall into the wrong hands and give scammers the opportunity to make their phishing messages look more believable.
In late May, Dr. James Woodson, the founder and CEO of Pulsara, sat down with Brian Zimmerman of the Becker’s Healthcare podcast series to discuss how telehealth can improve patient care and protect clinicians during COVID-19 and beyond. During the podcast, Dr. Woodson explains the potential of mobile technology in healthcare communication, how Pulsara streamlines the communication process, and Pulsara's role in the future of telemedicine. Listen to the podcast here, or read the interview below.
