A few years ago, CMIOs thought secure messaging would tick the box on compliance issues. So, how come insecure texting is still an issue for most hospitals? User adoption. Or the lack thereof, more specifically.
“Most of the time, when hospitals implement new technology, and if it’s implemented for compliance reasons, it’s not asked for. With Telmediq’s solution, when people hear about it, they want it NOW and have been asking the CEO when the timeline is to get it.” - Dr. Nicholas Perkins, Internist, Hospitalist, and Physician Informaticist for Greenville Health Systems
One survey found that 97% of doctors are using insecure chat apps1 to send patient information and one client demonstrated that only 25% of its physicians knew these options were insecure.
Physicians just want an easy way to communicate!
Dr. Perkins introduced us to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) which demonstrates that users must perceive any new system as both useful and easy to encourage initial utilization. Secure texting point solutions solved a compliance need, but didn’t solve a pressing need at the clinical level. After all, a doctor could easily meet the same communication need by sending a standard (insecure) text message.
To ensure that your deployed solution reaches critical mass with your user base of physicians, nurses and administrators, your strategy should include:- Involvement of the Clinical Team - Respecting the users, processes and technologies that make your hospital tick will help ensure that your new platform aligns with the unique needs of your hospital. Including physician and nurse leaders during the needs assessment, selection and deployment processes creates more value for users.
- Connect Systems to Drive Value - Reduce the current barriers to communication by unifying existing, fragment systems such as the EHR, call center, scheduling platforms, pager networks, lab notifications and nurse call solutions. Integrating software reduces the number of steps to communicate and can simplify complicated workflows (such as discharges, actioning critical lab results, care team coordination).
- Improve Processes - Setting up custom user groups, workflows and escalation paths helps introduce greater automation and oversight into your existing processes. Aside from better meeting expectations for when and how communication should take place, improved processes can ensure urgent and non-urgent messages are received, read and/or responded to in a timely manner and that rounding and real-time documentation are better supported with easy-to-use templates.
With the right solution, the value of improved processes speaks for itself very quickly, driving up user adoption. Over time, these improvements can be felt, and measured, in areas such message response time, patient throughput, staffing resource allocation and even patient satisfaction.
“It was taking 20 minutes to call in a consult or to close the loop on critical lab results because of all the steps in a broken chain of communications and a lack of awareness in the system about who’s on call and when. Now, we can automatically route critical results and log communication back to the provider with no nurse intervention required.” - Dr. Nicholas Perkins, Internist, Hospitalist, and Physician Informaticist for Greenville Health Systems
At Telmediq, we respect the unique workflows, technologies and user groups of your hospital. It’s this level of service that recently won us the prestigious 2018 KLAS award for Secure Communications Platforms. We support clients with a variety of training material and a support team to ensure users gain the value the solution affords them.
Working closely with you to build out an effective communication plan, we can help you deploy a secure communication platform - in only 10 days. Contact us to learn more.
Sources: 1.“WhatsApp Doc?”, BMJ Innovation: http://innovations.bmj.com/content/early/2017/10/24/bmjinnov-2017-000239