What can we do to reduce noise? There are many attempts to reduce noise in hospitals. Reducing noise should improve the patient experience and improve HCAHP scores. Just as important and a bi-product of noise is patient anxiety! Patients unexpectedly find themselves in a new setting, away from home, facing the unknown in the form of a health condition, unfamiliar with their surroundings or the routine. Activity going on all around them that they do not understand:

What are all these alarms for? Did someone die? Are they for me?

Why does the nurse keep leaving my room to talk on the phone? Is it my doctor? Why don't they want me to hear?

They are always getting calls when they are treating me and leaving the room.

Are they understaffed? If I need assistance, will it be available?

That's a new alarm sound! What does it mean? I don't see any nurses anywhere? What is going on?

Why is this machine attached to me beeping? What does it mean? Am I taking a turn for the worst? Should I call my nurse? Where are they?

I wish my doctor would call. I asked the nurse to notify him I'm having a new pain. The nurse says they can't do anything without the doctor's approval. When will they contact him? Why hasn't he got back to them? Can't they call him again?

Why didn't the nurse answer her phone when she was in my room? Maybe it was my doctor?

Too often caregivers and the communication tools they are given only add to the anxiety.

Alarms all sounding the same and difficult to differentiate their urgency are heard throughout every hospital unit. Nurses go home exhausted from alarm fatigue. Patients lay in bed awakened at all hours of the day and night with anxiety at what the cacophony of alarms and other noises mean.

Nurses are provided phones as the main tool to communicate with other caregivers, departments, and doctors. Unfortunately HIPAA requires they do not talk of clinical matters in front of a patient. The phone causes numerous interruptions for nurses treating patients requiring they leave the room. If they do not answer the phone alternate strategies of overhead paging, and attempts to find them take over.

Today's technology offers many other solutions:

Alarm management tools can make sense of the numerous disjointed devices producing the cacophony of alarm noise.

Sophisticated nurse text messaging (similar to what is available on smartphones) can eliminate 78% of ringing telephone calls, almost all overhead paging and the potential for missed patient requests.

When looking to reduce noise, consider improving patient anxiety as well. It will more than give you justification and urgency to proceed and result in a better environment for all.

So, we all hate going to the doctor’s office for one reason or another, whether it’s because it’s not fun being sick, you hate needles, or it’s just a pain to take time out of your busy schedule. One of my biggest pet peeves is walking into my doctor’s office, checking in with the receptionist, filling out any necessary paperwork (which is normally about fifteen pages) and then you sit. You sit and wait for what seems like a lifetime, not knowing if you will be next or if the eight people sitting there along with you will be called back before you. No one gives you any idea of a time frame on how long you will be there. Everyone has his or her face buried in a magazine and not much conversation is had.

Well, all of that is about to change. Close your eyes and picture this. You enter through large wooden doors into a beautiful lobby area. Directly in front of you is a peaceful and serene waterfall. To your right is a big screen TV that takes up the entire wall. Right next to this is a cheerful chef making delicious chocolate chip cookies or a healthy chicken salad. A smiling face then greets you and introduces himself or herself as a member of the Life Guide team.

A Life Guide meets patients immediately upon entering the clinic and redirects them to a decentralized check-in area. This private, more intimate area allows patients to feel like their visit is one-on-one. The Life Guide helps with any paperwork and gives a brief tour of the clinic, and when the caregiver is ready, the Life Guide escorts the patient to a procedure room. No longer are patients sitting in a lobby, waiting and wondering how long it will be until they are seen by a caregiver. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?

Now open your eyes because this is the reality at one group of forward-thinking clinics. I recently went to a newly opened Mosaic Clinic in Kansas City, Missouri for a site visit, and as I was introducing new Voalte users to the solution, I kept asking myself, “What is this Life Guide position all about?” I learned that Life Guides are there to make patients feel as though they are not just numbers. Life Guides are welcoming, caring, and compassionate, and they help guide patients through the sometimes confusing and frustrating process of obtaining healthcare services. Most traditional clinics can make us feel like we’re trapped in the “hurry up and wait” game. We are checked in and paperwork is pushed through and we are left to wonder whether we will be there for ten minutes, one hour or half a day. In Kansas City, the status quo is no longer good enough. At Mosaic clinics, you, the patient, are the main priority from the moment you walk through those doors, and we all know there is no better feeling in the world than when someone makes you feel special. Inarguably, Life Guides are playing a critical role in solidly establishing Mosaic as a leader in this movement towards more comprehensive, personalized service. Nationwide clinics take note. We’re your patients, your customers, and THIS is what we want!

One of the many fun facets of my job as a Voalte clinical trainer is travel. Lots and lots of travel. Crosstown and cross-country. Short-term (I've spent less than 24 hours onsite before flying out again) and long-term (after a month in Houston, I had fallen in love with "The Big Heart," a nickname the city earned post-Katrina). When I'm not introducing new users to Voalte One, I'm kayaking outside the La Jolla sea caves, eating whole lobster in the North End (yep, wore the bib!), and watching sunkissed city kids dancing at the waterwall at Millenium Park…

On a recent long flight sans Wi-Fi and entertainment, I had time to do some thinking and I found myself in awe of how drastically working for Voalte has changed the way I perceive and experience our world. Specifically, I'm now acutely aware of our connectedness…all the different ways we choose to communicate, conduct business, and foster relationships.

Voalte is indisputably the industry leader in smartphone healthcare communications, but somewhere over New Mexico I considered that we're also still very much at the forefront of a broader movement towards more efficient interactions conveyed via increasingly sophisticated technologies. We're among the communication cowboys (and girls)! How fitting that I was thinking of this 29,000 feet over Santa Fe.

Of course, there are valid arguments against this evolution, trend, whatever you want to call it. People are concerned that we're swiftly losing the value of personal interaction and face time (the literal meaning, not the Jobs creation), and there might be something to that. Instead of exchanging a handshake when I accepted employment with Voalte, I signed and scanned a document. I emailed my enthusiasm to an office 1,248 miles away. So I get it. I empathize with a fear of the implications that pulling back from human-to-human connections might have on us. But while I waited for the flight attendant to reach my row with the beverage service, I put together an entirely different, more positive spin on technology-assisted communication.

The bottom line for me is this. All of that impersonal communication technology facilitated me finding and gaining employment with Voalte, and now when I return from my travels, I come back to smiles, and hugs, and long "catching up" conversations with coworkers that have quickly become friends. Technology isn't impersonalizing communication; it's expanding our world and allowing us access to people, places, and activities that weren't possible before. So I'm proud that we're connectivity pioneers. I'll keep viewing the world with excitement for the future, open to all the possibilities that new communication methods will bring. I've witnessed firsthand in hospitals all over the country what we have accomplished in healthcare; I can't wait to see what other industries will introduce…

When I heard that the National Patient Safety Foundation was celebrating Patient Safety Awareness Week this week, my first thought was "Great. What about the other 51 weeks out of the year?" If there were ever a time to get really sick and get rushed to the hospital, this would be the week to do it!

But patient safety is no joking matter. When the New York Times wrote about patient safety in hospitals last November, I don't think anyone in the healthcare field was surprised with the study's findings. The general public, on the other hand, was shocked to read that medical mistakes cause as many as 98,000 preventable deaths and over one million injuries a year. An even more shocking way to look at it is the oft-repeated phrase: "Hospitals kill a jumbo jet full of patients every day due to medical errors."

Studies attribute a large portion of these errors to poor communication and The Joint Commission has even stated that inefficient communication is consistently the root cause of sentinel events. It's no surprise then that the goal for the patient safety campaign is to improve patient care through better communication.

This is something that has always been a core value for Voalte. In fact, improving communication and patient outcomes is part of our Mission Statement. However, regardless of whether it's through Voalté or another system, hospitals need to think about their communication strategy as it relates to patient safety. The technology afforded by smartphones and other mobile devices, while certainly cool, is merely the enabler to improved communication. Think of it as trying to lose weight by buying a workout video. The video is the tool for success, but it's up to the viewer to watch the video, follow the routines correctly, and supplement it with a healthy diet. With the right communication diet, perhaps we can turn that jumbo jet into a little Cesna.

Hospitals all over the country are thinking about patient safety this week and communication plays a big role in that. Below is a fun video from UMC on the subject. Sometimes humor gets the message across more than you think. 

What's your hospital doing for Patient Safety Awareness Week?