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One-Click Safe Handoff Made Possible with Telmediq

Healthcare organizations have long struggled with the process of patient handoff and the necessary passing of critical information from one physician or care team to another. The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare found that sub-standard hand-offs result in work inefficiencies and increased costs and was a leading cause in treatment delays, mistakes or adverse events. 

Early attempts to improve patient hand-offs were both cumbersome and time consuming: data had to be synthesized and summarized from different sources and communicated with the receiver. There were often checklists and forms to complete. Even aided by technology, miscommunications and delays remained prevalent and critical information was often overlooked, particularly clinical notes.

In order to improve patient hand-offs, the Joint Commission outlines that hand-off communication be “timely, accurate, completely unambiguous and understood by the recipient.” 

Telmediq’s Safe Handoff Feature 

Telmediq Safe Hand-offsTelmediq has addressed this breakdown in handoff communication with a one-touch handoff procedure from any device (smartphone, laptop, tablet or PC):

  1. The outgoing physician selects a patient and, in one click, chooses who to hand off to. That handoff includes all patient information, including data from the EMR, lab results, clinical notes, pending or completed orders and threaded chats. 
  2. The recipient physician must either accept or reject the patient. When accepted, the doctor has immediate access to the full patient file, including notes from physicians and nurses and the status of orders and tests. 
  3. In the event of a delay, the outgoing patient hand-off will be escalated to another clinician based on the organization's pre-defined escalation policy for patient hand-offs.
No checklist required. No follow-ups necessary. And no need to compile information from multiple sources. The full historical record is immediately accessible, organized and searchable, with information for follow-up outlined.
 
Telmediq’s Safe Hand-Off feature and auto-escalation of patient handoff reduces the delays and errors associated with traditional patient handoffs without disrupting or interfering with regular clinical workflow. No other technology meets the Joint Commission requirements for safe patient hand-offs. 
 
Thanks to the 40+ integration possibilities in the Telmediq Communication Hub, each patient file will contain information from the EMR / EHR, lab results, alarms and more. Each patient file is automatically connected with the entire care team, making communication about the patient seamless and timely. Physicians can easily drill down into information about each patient or see the stream of orders, results and actions required for all the patients in their care, ordered by priority. 

If your hospital struggles with delays in patient hand-offs or orders, contact us to discuss how we can tie together your healthcare systems to create more efficient - and safe - patient care. 

References:

  • https://www.jointcommission.org/assets/1/6/tst_hoc_persp_08_12.pdf 
  • http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/746070_2 

blog, Clinical Workflow, Feature, Joint Commission, Patient Safety, Safe Handoff, Telmediq