Improve Healthcare Outcomes and Maximize Your Tech Investments
Original publish date: February 21, 2022
Technology in the healthcare sector continues to evolve to meet the rapidly changing needs of patients. From emergency facilities to long-term and aged care centers, gone are the days when paper charts and stethoscopes can get the job done. And, with over 20% of healthcare professionals leaving the industry all together since 2020, hospitals need all of the resources possible to equip remaining staff to deliver the best possible healthcare outcomes for their patients.
Improving healthcare technology – including clinical mobility – is now a priority for many institutions. According to a 2023 study from Bain and Company cited in Healthcare Finance News, healthcare institutions continue to accelerate their spending on technology, particularly IT and software. Also, compared to 34% of respondents in 2022, 56% cited software and technology as one of their top three strategic priorities. And, according to a 2023 IDC poll, more than 88% of hospital CIOs plan to increase their investments in third party technology through 2024. But what exactly should healthcare organizations be prioritizing when it comes to these technology investments? We explore four key strategies that are essential to improving healthcare outcomes and getting the most out of your healthcare technology investments.
1. Identify and Scale Operational Efficiencies
Nurses fear the quality of care patients receive is suffering because they cannot do everything they need to do during their shift. Nurses and other clinicians are often stretched too thin to provide the level of care, quality and responsiveness they’d like due to a growing list of challenges—from staffing shortages to time-consuming data entry tasks. These factors not only reduce productivity levels, they also drive down patient satisfaction. And in fact, a study from the Joint Commission reported a 19% rise in “adverse events” (defined as adverse outcomes, morbidity, and mortality) in 2022 alone.
The right mobile solution empowers caregivers with ready access to clinical applications and workflow-aligned tools that help save time and reduce errors. Plus, built-in data analytics and reporting can help IT measure tool usage and effectiveness, so they’re able to identify and scale clinical workflow improvements more quickly and cost-effectively.
2. Enable Interoperability
Disparate systems and technology can create real barriers to care team collaboration while complicating workflows and contributing to clinician burnout and alarm fatigue. This fragmentation of resources can also limit the value of larger IT investments such as EHRs and weigh down efforts to achieve strategic priorities such as digital transformation.
Advanced mobile solutions enable new levels of interoperability by providing an open platform for integration with existing hospital communication systems. By providing a single, unified communications solution that integrates voice, messaging and video, clinical mobile devices can also help hospitals measurably increase care team collaboration and responsiveness.
3. Expand Data Visibility
Data sharing between providers, payers, government, and industry continues to have a significant impact on improving the patient experience. Clinicians often struggle to get the information they need – when and where they need it – because data is distributed among multiple, siloed systems. Next-gen mobile solutions provide a unified platform that streamlines data access to ensure a single, reliable source of truth for all care team providers. By integrating with EHR systems, mobile solutions can automate access to critical patient data to inform care decisions and prevent errors that put patients at risk. Plus, today’s top clinical mobile devices are embedded with advanced and proven security features to protect patient data and ensure compliance.
4. Enhance Patient Engagement
Patients have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to their healthcare provider. Optimizing care team communication and collaboration is essential to providing more attentive, responsive and personalized care that measures up to or exceeds patient expectations. The right mobile solution can help enhance caregiver responsiveness and care quality in a number of ways.
Intelligent routing, built-in escalation paths and other advanced mobile capabilities can help ensure alerts and messages reach the right clinicians – and are responded to promptly. Plus, video and other educational tools can be used to better engage and empower patients throughout their healthcare experience.
Summary
By maximizing technology investments with a focus around scaling operational efficiencies, interoperability, data sharing and visibility, and improved patient engagement, hospitals can continue to provide exceptional patient care and improve patient outcomes. Investing in technology, such as Spectralink’s clinical mobility solutions, can help to alleviate nurse and clinician burnout and help less staff to care for more patients by providing information, communication, alarming, alerts, and critical patient care workflows all from one device that is always on hand. Reach out to our team for more information on how we can help you to enable better patient care, faster.