Telmediq Founder and CEO Ben Moore joined John Lynn, Editor and Founder of the HealthcareScene blog network, for a live video interview on May 24, 2017. Ben talked about the founding of Telmediq and the current complexities of healthcare communication for most hospitals.
View the interview below:
What Communication Looks Like in Hospitals Today
Hospitals today are adding in many new technologies, including EHRs, to provide more effective care to patients. The end result has been an over-abundance of siloed healthcare solutions, with communications technologies often among the most antiquated.
“When you walk into a hospital today, you’re going to find some old technology that’s been there for some time,” notes Ben Moore, CEO of Telmediq. “20, 30, 40-year old technology, including a mix of pagers, telephones, desktop paging systems. A lot of overhead paging goes on in the hospital today.”
“Because of the age of this technology, none of it seamlessly integrates with all of the other healthcare IT systems, including the EHR. 9 years ago, only 10% of hospitals were fully up on electronic health record. Fast forward 9 years later, 90% of hospitals are up on electronic records, but the vast majority have not upgraded their communication systems past telephones and pager devices.”
The end result, notes Ben in the interview, is a lot of fragmented technologies. Even within our own industry, we see communication technologies such as secure texting just being layered on top of all these other technologies. This isn’t helping reduce complexity or streamline communications. Indeed, user adoption of secure texting as a standalone application tends to be low, with a lot of non HIPAA-compliant texting still going on outside of these platforms.
In order to boost adoption rates of any new communication platform, you need to add value. Our level of adoption has been 100%.
The Future of Healthcare Communication: Driving Value Through Integration
At Telmediq, our approach has been to look at the whole communication ecosystem and figure out how to streamline and simplify that communication through the use of software. We want to remove the complexity of having 10-12 different communication systems and replace that with our Healthcare Communication Hub (HCH), which then drives all of your communications to improve patient outcomes and speed up care delivery. Yes, there’s still secure texting and voice communications (since voice still makes up 90% communications in a hospital), but that communication can now be simplified, co-ordinated and documented.
At Telmediq, we’re not just going to hand you a piece of technology and walk away. We come in and map out your technologies, processes, teams and roles to see how a healthcare organization uses communication today. Even a single integration point with the EHR (and we offer many others) has the potential to revolutionize communication. For example, updates to the EHR can be pushed out to the care team and updates can be pushed back to the EHR, saving time for clinicians as they are running around the hospital.
It’s the ability to drive notifications from the EHR and other clinical systems that attracts users and drives up adoption rates of our HCH, helping realize the positive outcomes of a new communication system very quickly.
In the interview, Ben describes the value that comes out of our integrations with the EHR and over 40 other clinical systems and how we turn all of this into one powerful platform that transforms how the care team works and collaborates toward effective patient care.
The interview then talks further about healthcare systems integration / interoperability, the importance of creating standards for writing to the EHR, how to mobilize nurses with hospital-owned devices, and the future of healthcare communications, which will include the patient.
About Ben Moore
In early 2012, after talking to several healthcare institutions about their current ‘Page and Pray’ communications methods, Ben learned that there was an opportunity to dramatically improve healthcare communications and ultimately patient outcomes. Telmediq was created and Ben worked closely with several well-respected groups of US healthcare institutions to launch the service.
Ben’s primary focus at Telmediq is driving product innovation. He is best known for connecting with customers directly to understand their challenges in order to optimize product development. Ben has played key management roles in two high growth technology success stories (Desire2Learn and Redknee) acting in product, business, and team leadership positions. Ben has authored patents in location-based emergency messaging.
Ben holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and a Degree in Pragmatic Product Management.
About Healthcare Scene
John Lynn’s HealthcareScene.com blog network launched in 2005 and currently consists of 10 blogs and resources containing over 9,500 articles on topics including EMR, EHR and Healthcare IT topics. As an influencer in the healthcare IT space, John Lynn regularly hosts conversations with industry leaders about the latest trends in healthcare.