Over the past decade, U.S. healthcare organizations have invested over $30 billion in technology to meet HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act) and other key government mandates. More recently, healthcare leaders have faced a new era of challenges stemming from the sheer complexity of these diverse systems, as well as the heightened demands of compliance mandates and patient-centered care models.
These challenges existed even before last year’s health crisis and have only been heightened since then, as hospital requirements and patient needs have rapidly evolved. Now more than ever, hospitals need solutions that allow them to maximize the value of their existing technology investments while empowering clinical care teams in new ways.
Below are four key strategies that are essential to improving healthcare outcomes and getting the most out of your healthcare technology investments—and they all center on enabling smartphones for clinical mobility.
- Target and adapt operational efficiencies - Nurses and other clinicians are often stretched too thin to provide the level of care quality and responsiveness they’d like due to a growing list of challenges–from staffing shortages to time-consuming data entry tasks. These factors not only reduce productivity levels, but they also drive down patient satisfaction.
The right mobile solution empowers caregivers with ready access to clinical applications and workflow-aligned tools that help save time and reduce errors. Plus, built-in data analytics and reporting can help IT measure tool usage and effectiveness, so they’re able to identify and scale clinical workflow improvements more quickly and cost-effectively.
- Enable interoperability - Disparate systems and technology can create real barriers to care team collaboration while complicating workflows and contributing to clinician burnout and alarm fatigue. This fragmentation of resources can also limit the value of larger IT investments such as EHRs and weigh down efforts to achieve strategic priorities such as digital transformation.
Advanced mobile solutions enable new levels of interoperability by providing an open platform for integration with existing hospital communication systems. By providing a single, unified communications solution that integrates voice, messaging and video, clinical mobile devices can also help hospitals measurably increase care team collaboration and responsiveness.
- Amplify data visibility - Clinicians often struggle to get the information they need—when and where they need it—because data is distributed among multiple, siloed systems. Next-gen mobile solutions provide a unified platform that streamlines data access to ensure a single, reliable source of truth for all care team providers.
By integrating with EHR systems, mobile solutions can automate access to critical patient data to inform care decisions and prevent errors that put patients at risk. Plus, today’s top clinical mobile devices are embedded with advanced and proven security features to protect patient data and ensure compliance.
- Enhance patient engagement - Patients have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to their healthcare provider. Optimizing care team communication and collaboration is essential to providing more attentive, responsive, and personalized care that measures up to or exceeds patient expectations. The right mobile solution can help enhance caregiver responsiveness and care quality in several ways.
Intelligent routing, built-in escalation paths, and other advanced mobile capabilities can help ensure alerts and messages reach the right clinicians—and are responded to promptly. Plus, video, and other educational tools can be used to better engage and empower patients throughout their healthcare experience.
Contact SMG3Rx today to learn how the right mobile solution can help your organization achieve better outcomes while getting the most out of your existing IT investments.
