Mobile devices are fostering greater collaboration at the point of care and helping to drive down health care costs. But as the ACO model takes hold—shifting the provision of care from acute care settings into the patient’s home—health IT professionals and providers alike are discovering that synchronous communication is the lynchpin that holds together all of the major parties comprising the health care ecosystem.
By enabling synchronous content streams—information shared and perhaps clarified in real-time—healthcare organizations are improving care, saving money, and empowering mid-level health care workers to help ensure continuity of high quality care.
For example, a patient in rural Kentucky who is struggling with medication management may not have access to a doctor, or an advanced practice nurse. Without the proper IT tool to enable synchronous communication—and the right health care worker to escalate that communication to the appropriate provider, as needed—often times the result is summoning an ambulance and sending the patient to an acute care facility.
But with the technology currently available—and by leveraging community health workers, health navigators, PAs, visiting nurses, and others in a position to funnel patient information to the right provider in real-time—that same medication management issue could be addressed without the need for a hospital visit.
Yes, a similar approach is being implemented through various telemedicine projects, but it’s not widespread yet.
Patricia Abbott, Ph.D., RN, FACMI, FAAN, Johns Hopkins University Schools of Nursing and Medicine, thinks the hold-up is partly cultural and partly technical, with legal and financial components adding to the challenges.
But she’s hopeful, noting that cultures at acute care settings are, in fact, slowly evolving.
“Part of it is recognizing that, just as we don’t need an astronaut to fly a crop duster, we don’t need a physician to diagnose an earache,” Abbott says. “We can leverage synchronous communications by empowering others in the ecosystem, such as nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and others, with the right IT tools.”
For Abbott, the proliferation of smart phones, virtual desktops, consumer media pads, VPN connectivity, and shifting attitudes in healthcare settings that increasingly are allowing health care professionals to bring their own devices to work—provided they meet regulatory and security requirements—signals an industry moving in the right direction.
“What I think is in the process of happening is a transition to real-time, live communication and information exchange that goes well beyond just sending an email or text, or making a phone call,” Abbott says. “Geography and the type of device you use is irrelevant when the data coming from all the various sources is integrated. Being able to use technology to support a very rich view of everything that’s going on is the goal; almost like being physically present at the bedside, even though you are not.”
What questions do you have?
As a B2B journalist, John Farrell has covered healthcare IT since 1997 and is Intel’s sponsored correspondent.
