Compared with other clinical and patient-facing roles in the acute care environment, physicians tend to have unique workflow needs in order to advance patient care. Disparate communication technologies will not typically meet these needs. Since physicians work across a multitude of units and facilities, they are often pulled in many different directions by colleagues in any number of departments.
The Physician’s Communication Challenge
When a patient’s condition changes, it’s not uncommon for physicians to be called, texted and paged at any and all hours with questions about medication orders and treatment plans. The result is physicians having to carry multiple communication devices—phones, pagers, laptops—and be strategic and discreet about sharing their contact information with colleagues.
Often, the vendors that healthcare organizations seek out to solve this problem only end up exacerbating by adding yet another technology that physicians need to adopt and learn to use, and making them even more vulnerable to nuisance calls from colleagues who are contacting the wrong person.
A unified platform, with a focus on protecting provider time and privacy, can mitigate much of the problem, and even return time to care.
WEBINAR: Register for our webinar to find out how your organization can boost provider satisfaction.
Cutting Through the Noise
What does a unified platform look like? We define this clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) term as a single application on a single device that enables all clinical and operational staff to securely communicate. Any and every communication modality—calls, texts, alerts, one-to-many broadcasts, even pages—can be sent from and received by the same app. When this happens, physicians don’t need to carry multiple devices for fear of missing an important message. A single application on their own smartphone can do all the heavy lifting.
Receiving all communications to one place can also help physicians better guard their privacy as there is one channel through which to reach them. A CC&C tool that is purpose-built for physicians will have safeguards in place to make sure that an off-shift physician will not receive nuisance calls from colleagues.
Some of the ways a physician-focused CC&C solution can accomplish this are:
- Real-time user statuses for on-call physicians to signal to colleagues whether they are available—and indicate who they can contact if they’re not available
- Dynamic Care Team™ information so clinicians know the correct physician to contact for a specific patient
- The ability for physicians to forward calls to their office line
- The ability for physicians to mask their personal number when making or receiving calls
For a complete picture of these features, download the one-pager.
Valuing Privacy, Emphasizing Collaboration
When physicians feel their offline privacy is being respected, they’re able to rest and regroup more effectively, leading to decreased rates of burnout and fatigue. It also means that colleagues are able to find the correct, on-call physician much faster, with fewer frustrating games of phone tag. With higher physician satisfaction, clinicians can return more time to caring for their patients.
In this way, organizations can make their CC&C platform work smarter for their clinical and operational employees. For more information on how your facilities can improve physician satisfaction and workflow outcomes, register for our upcoming webinar.