With a focus on patient-centered care, healthcare providers are searching for solutions that can improve patient outcomes, especially now as hospitals navigate increasing demands and strain. Clinical mobility solutions–including purpose-built smartphones–help improve communication among care team members, accelerate patient response times, and save clinicians’ valuable time.

Below are 5 ways clinical mobility can help your care teams achieve better patient outcomes.

1. Accelerate Response Times - Delays in patient care often result from clinicians wasting time tracking down patient information or feedback from other care team members. HIPAA-compliant messaging applications allow care team members to securely exchange confidential patient information in real-time, eliminating delays in patient care and hand-offs. In fact, 81% of clinicians say mobile access to medical information helps them more effectively coordinate patient care (PWC Health Research Institute).
2. Improve Communication Channels - Outdated technology can lead to costly inefficiencies. 45 minutes per day, or $5.1 billion dollars per year, are wasted due to the use of outdated communication technology according to the Ponemon Institute Research Report. Smartphones designed for today’s modern clinical environment provide nurses and physicians with secure access to patients’ protected health information (PHI). Clinicians can update patient charts at the point-of-care, allowing them to spend more time with the patient, and less time in front of a computer. Patient data is automatically updated in the hospital’s EHR system, providing a “single source of truth” for care team members. This saves time and reduces the risk of costly discrepancies or miscommunication.
3. Eliminate unnecessary steps - Nurses walk up to 5 miles around the hospital in a single shift. Using clinical smartphones can help them complete routine tasks more efficiently such as locating supplies and medications, receiving critical test results, and identifying on-call nurses and physicians for rounding and follow-up. This allows them to spend more with their patients, improve critical decision making, and create a more positive patient experience.
4. Prevent Alarm Fatigue - Many clinicians find themselves bombarded with patient requests for water, pain medication, bathroom assistance, etc. In fact, 85%-90% of alarm signals do not require clinical intervention, leading to alarm fatigue. Alarm monitoring solutions enable nurses to view, prioritize and address alarms on the go. This ensures that patient needs are addressed quickly and that critical alerts are prioritized appropriately, resulting in improved patient outcomes and higher patient satisfaction.
5. Reduce Overhead Noise - Patients can’t heal if they can’t sleep. Clinical alerting systems help reduce overhead noise by delivering test results, patient monitoring alerts, and other important updates directly to a clinician’s mobile device. This removes the need for hospital paging systems and significantly reduces overhead noise. Hospitals that have successfully completed a smartphone deployment saw up to 80% reduction in overhead pages.

Contact us today to learn more about how mobility can empower your team to be more effective and improve patient outcomes.