Resources

Smart Hospitals White Paper Library

Clinical Strategy Guide:
3 Steps to a Smooth Smartphone Integration

Businesses across every industry understand that employees need to communicate clearly and effectively for their companies to succeed. When your business involves caring for people who are ill or injured, the consequences of inefficient communication are even more significant.

Poor communication in hospitals was cited as the third most frequent root cause of sentinel events. Smart hospitals are responding by integrating mobile technologies for clinicians.

Is your clinical team equipped with a smartphone strategy?

IT Strategy Guide:
4 Steps to a Smooth Smartphone Integration

Smartphones for clinical communication are the wave of the future. Considering that 8 of 10 employees reported using personal technology for business use, it’s possible some staff members are already using their own smartphones on the job, meaning the future is closer than you might think.

But before you start passing out the latest smartphones to your hospital staff, it’s vital to understand your technical infrastructure, engage your clinical team, and create a rollout and support strategy.

So the question is, does your IT department have a smartphone strategy?

The Smart Alternative: Three Ways Smartphones Outperform Legacy Communication Devices

In an ideal world, a nurse's attention should never leave her patients. When health and safety are at stake, low priority alarms, pages, and phone calls should wait until a patient is properly attended. But of course, that is not the reality of hospital life.

Many hospitals have come to accept such distractions, and the risks they create, as unavoidable sacrifices to the complexities of modern medicine. And historically, there's never been a way around it.

Until now.

Crawl, Walk, Run: Three Steps to Improving Clinical Efficiency and Effectiveness

Hospital administrators recognize the importance of internal communication. They realize that clinicians must be able to connect easily with each other, their patients, laboratory and radiology staff, and other providers. To solve the problem, many hospitals equip clinicians with communication tools, including legacy wireless phones, pagers, PDAs and voice badges. A virtual “tool belt.”

But if you ask a nurse about that tool belt, there are too many tools to juggle, too many beeps and buzzes. Their communication tool belt, ironically, weakens communication.

After reading this white paper you will be better prepared to equip your clinician's with a communication tool that will help improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Turning Chaos into Calm:
Three Ways Smartphones Improve the ED Throughput Process

While all hospital clinicians tackle an array of critical tasks every day, nowhere are these tasks more rampant than in the emergency room. An unpredictable stream of patients arrive 24/7, requiring around-the-clock registration and triage. ED nurses must oversee the transfer of patients to providers, to diagnostics, to critical laboratory and pharmacy, and to therapies. And finally, for each patient, a nurse must coordinate admission or release.

Each one of these tasks requires close communication within and between departments. The quicker, more efficient the communication, the quicker, more efficient the ED throughput process. And therein lays the problem.

After reading this white paper, you will be able to:

Understand the causes of inefficient ED communication
Identify ways to improve your throughput process

Four Steps to Developing a Successful Smartphone Strategy

Smartphone technology has already worked its way into hospitals as caregivers increasingly bring personal devices to work. Forward-thinking hospitals plan for smartphone integration to leverage the devices for maximum impact. Before a hospital can ready itself for implementation, stakeholders need to look to the horizon and formulate their vision. Developing a sound mobility strategy includes preparing the infrastructure and planning the workflow changes necessary to reap the maximum benefit from smartphones.

After reading this white paper you will learn how a successful smartphone strategy can help you:

Build an effective mobility model
Develop an efficient workflow process
Implement and deploy devices that clinicians want and enjoy using

3 Tips to Reducing Noise
& Unnecessary Interruptions

Nine out of ten times a text message can be used instead of voice, reducing overall noise and unnecessary interruptions. Pagers, alarms, phones, hallway conversations, and other sounds fill hospital corridors every hour of every day. Such commotion would be a distraction anywhere, but in a patient care environment the stakes could not be higher–life and death are literally on the line. Yet the problem continues to occur.

After reading this white paper, you will be able to:

Understand the causes of noise and unnecessary interruptions
Identify the affects it has on your patients and staff
Gain tips on how smartphones can help reduce noise

The Impact of Failed Communication on Patient Safety and Satisfaction

Failed communication is cited as the number one problem during root cause analysis of sentinel events or "near miss" episodes. Missed messages, critical alarm failures, or patient transition issues are among the most common events recorded. While these events result in the most serious outcomes, dozens of other routine communication incidents occur daily, resulting in inefficient use of worker time, and hospital resources. These stresses impact productivity, staff morale, job satisfaction and often contribute to turnover of highly trained and specialized staff members.

This white paper will help you understand your clinician's daily communication activities and challenges, pinpoint the effects of failed communication on care coordination, and identify the positive impact smartphones have on safety and efficiency.

Bridging the Gap: Smart Hospitals Collaborating for Successful Smartphone Implementation

Hospitals nationwide grapple with a shrinking pool of qualified clinicians, reduced budgets, and escalating patient care needs. Many hospitals are implementing technology to expand the capabilities of clincial staff to meet these demands. Smartphones emerge as the technology of choice.

In order to create an effective solution from the beginning, clinical, IT and ancillary department staff members must collaborate to create a system that meshes well with the entire patient continuum. The results will empower hosptial staff to meet patient care needs through a less chaotic and efficient process.

The Smartphone Invasion: What's Your Hospital's Mobility Strategy?
In your hospital, valuable time is lost every hour. Where's the nurse? Where's the NCT? Did room 332 get pain meds yet? Smartphones offer "anywhere" access to people and information. Hospitals risk being left behind if they don't embrace and utilize this technology. The key is being SMART about incorporating smartphone technology.

Smart Hospitals: Embracing Smartphones at the Point-of-Care
Hospitals are plagued by communication problems. Smartphones provide a new platform for improving patient care. Compared to today's medical break-throughs, hospital communication systems fail to keep pace. Outdated paging systems and multiple communications devices cause confusion and reduce efficiency in hospitals. Smartphones offer a solution to many of today's healthcare communication issues.