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Facilitating Communication Among Widely Dispersed Healthcare Teams

Hospitalist groups have grown in prominence in recent years due to more effective allocation of resources and improved patient care. However, the same scaling of service that makes hospitalist groups so effective is also responsible for increased complexity. In order to deliver on the benefits of distributed care teams, it’s important to ensure effective communication systems are in place. 

Communication Key to Effective Hospitalist Groups

As John Nelson, MD, Mhm notes in an article for The Hospitalist, poor scheduling and operational practices often undermine the aims of hospitalist groups, ultimately leading to poor continuity of patient care during hand-off or scheduling transitions. 

In order to ensure continuity, the Society of Hospital Medicine's The Key Principles and Characteristics of an Effective Hospital Medicine Group guide suggests that hospitalists step in as “captain of the ship” to facilitate communication among the care team and serve as the main physician of contact for patients, families and primary care physicians. In order for these communication and co-ordination requirements not to lead to dramatic spikes in administrative overhead, hospitalist groups have turned to the Telmediq Healthcare Communications Hub for an integrated solution to simplify communications and workflow. We have helped ensure:

  • More efficient and accurate communication to support team-based care (hospitalists, specialists, primary care physicians, nurses, social workers, physical therapists, home-health providers)
  • Support for care team communication, regardless of role or location.
  • Care team accurately reflects call schedules and availability, with no need to look up new contact information
  • Efficient workflow, particularly for care coordination and mobilizing communications and workflows (such as interacting with the EHR) that were previously tied to workstations
  • Safer patient handoffs, with easy access to the full patient record as well as updated clinical notes
  • Improved admission / discharge processes 
  • Financial savings (maximizing the ROI of existing technology investments and consolidating vendor services)

Sound Physicians Taps into the Power of Integrated Communications with Telmediq

Telmediq’s Healthcare Communications Hub taps into the EHR, on-call schedules, call systems, alarms, and lab systems, becoming a mobile healthcare workstation available anytime, anywhere with secure two-way messaging capabilities. The comprehensive capabilities of our platform are particularly felt in widely dispersed hospital networks and hospitalist groups. 

“With Telmediq we’ve improved the efficiency of admissions and lowered the cost of care by enabling doctors in the community to send patients directly to hospitalists. By doing so, we’ve reduced some of the demands on ED by promoting an alternate and more efficient path to care for patients.

In terms of quality of care, mobile communications provide our staff instant access to the people, data and information they need at hand to deliver care. We’re now able to provide better accountability as a organization to our partners and patients. For example, in a Doc to Doc transfer; our ability to relay pertinent and contextual information via Telmediq to an incoming doc has greatly mitigated the risks of patient handoffs.” Joshua Kermisch, Group VP, Sound Physicians

The Telmediq Healthcare Communications Hub can connect multiple hospitals and clinics, making it possible to connect with a care team that may be widely distributed. Given the complicated nature of managing a large, mobile care team with different call schedules and availability, smart routing based on availability and pre-set escalation rules ensures that messages are always received, no chasing required.

With 1,800 hospitalist and post-acute physicians providing patient care to more than 180 hospitals and a growing number of post-acute care centres in 35 states across the U.S., leading hospitalist group Sound Physicians relies on Telmediq’s Healthcare Communications Hub to improve internal and external efficiencies in communication. In a recent webinar, Sound Physicians Group Vice President Joshua Kermisch describes the inefficiencies they experienced with call centres and alternate communication platforms, problems which were driving up costs, failing to scale and creating major delays in care. 

In the webinar, Kermisch shares the transformative improvements that Telmediq’s Healthcare Communication Hub has had at the organizational, departmental and individual levels. Supporting effective and efficient collaboration, patient-centric hand-off, and advanced analytics have all helped drive down healthcare costs and improve the quality of patient care. To learn more check out the full webinar here.

Point solutions often fail to address the complexity of healthcare communications, particularly for widely dispersed and diverse healthcare systems and hospitalist groups. To learn more about how Telmediq can simplify healthcare communications and workflows even across wide systems, contact us.

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blog, Case Study, healthcare communications, Healthcare Systems, HIT, Hospitalist Group, Sound Physicians, Webinar