In May 2020, Becker’s Hospital Review put together a 10 page document titled Improving Clinical Collaboration: Three Steps to Better Informed, More Efficient Patient Care in the Wake of COVID-19.
As the title infers, the article discussed the need for collaboration between all members of a health system as well as different health systems, and between patients and physicians. The lack of efficient communication and mobile access were both highlighted as key issues within collaboration in healthcare.
When considering mobile access and telehealth, the article also presented the issue of insufficient wifi coverage to maintain the amount of mobile collaboration that would be ideal in a hospital setting.These issues can lead to overcrowding in hospitals, health staff burnout, and unintended patient outcomes.
When considering collaboration within healthcare, four main ideas were discussed – patient referrals, patient engagement/experience, readmission rate, and emergency department care.
In terms of healthcare collaboration, if you consider how many different physicians you see in your lifetime, a lot of different healthcare professionals have various types of health data about you. Collaboration between all of one’s physicians would not only improve the patient care quality and experience, but it would also lead to an increase in referrals between physicians or medical professionals.
The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), something I had previously not heard of, was discussed in relation to patient engagement and experience. HCAHPS is used to evaluate a patient’s perception of care within a health setting and the opinion of the patient regarding communication within the hospital. This should be used as a way to improve collaboration between several health professionals when discussing the same patient.
Readmission Rate is another key metric used to evaluate communication and collaboration, among other things, in a healthcare setting. Specifically, this metric can be used to measure how effective communication is between the patient and the provider, and between the entire care team/health system as a whole.
The last main idea discussed was care delivered in emergency departments (ED). The article cited that roughly 145 million patients receive care in an ED per year. A lot of these patients go to the ED due to convenience (in terms of location or hours) even when their situation isn’t deemed a legitimate “emergency.” The excessive amount of patients within an ED at any given time leads to long wait times and overcrowding. To help with said issues, I recall seeing electronic billboards in different towns with up-to-date wait times for different hospital’s ED’s.
There are also things that hospitals can focus on, such as who the patient is being discharged to and how they are being discharged, while they are still in the ED so that when the patient is able to leave, they can do so efficiently. This would help to decrease overcrowding and wait times, overall speeding up the process of getting patients in and out while guaranteeing that each patient receives adequate care. This can be transferred to any health setting. Another example would be a receptionist providing the bill or any necessary paperwork to a patient while they are still waiting to see the provider, so that they are able to leave immediately after seeing the provider.
A combination of the aforementioned solutions with the addition of smartsourcing would be extremely effective in improving collaboration within any type of health setting.
Want to learn more?
Check out one of my previous posts about patient care- https://mattjmorrow.wordpress.com/2020/06/17/focusing-on-patient-care-webinar-review-and-analysis/
I discussed a method being implemented at John Muir Health that could solve a lot of issues within lack of collaboration in health systems. An excerpt follows:
“Chris Pass of John Muir Health had some similar ideas in relation to integrating healthcare, and he proposed the idea of implementing a command center to focus on bringing all aspects of a hospital’s control under one roof. He discussed what his health center is doing in terms of innovation, explaining that they often have “safety huddles,” which are meetings that include every department altogether in one room. This is done either campus-by-campus or enterprise wide. “
As always, thanks for reading!
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Matt Morrow 