Hospitalist Service Uses Proficient Health to Enable Direct Communication, Reduce Patient Wait Times and Ensure HIPAA Compliance

Hospitalist Service Uses Proficient Health to Enable Direct Communication, Reduce Patient Wait Times and Ensure HIPAA Compliance

CHALLENGE:
Complicated patient assignment plans and frequent changes to call schedules make hospitalist communication difficult

The Hospitalist Service at WakeMed Health and Hospitals consists of more than 150 providers, including moonlighters and residents who cover three campuses. Given the size and complexity of the service, there are frequent and last-minute scheduling changes.

The Hospitalist Service follows the majority of patients being admitted to the hospital and is the pipeline for consults to every specialist service. As a result, efficient delivery of care is often dependent on the ability to effectively and efficiently manage communication between their service and the ED, inpatient care team, specialty consulting services, and primary care teams.

Connecting with providers through traditional methods of communication via offices, P2P lines and answering services can be cumbersome and time consuming. Connecting via pagers is not secure and often leads to generic messaging and/or “coded” messages, leaving the consulted provider with too little information or worse, confusing information.

One of the greatest challenges in supporting direct and speedy communication between services has been ensuring that up-to-date on-call information is easily accessible to providers as they move from location to location.

SOLUTION:
Integrated call schedules and automated roles made messaging simple

PH Connect rolled out in November 2017 for the Adult Hospitalist group at WakeMed. The secure communication solution helped streamline collecting on-call information through a user-friendly call schedule builder and integrations with LightingBolt, AMiON, and Qgenda. Through the implementation of PH Connect, the Hospitalist group had on-call information at their fingertips, with all schedules accessible via a mobile app. PH Connect’s QuickCover allowed for coverage changes to be handled directly from a provider’s mobile app without disrupting the communication flow.

Providers now utilize defined roles in PH Connect, eliminating the stress of remembering practice specific coverage “rules” (i.e. cardiology on-call). PH Connect connects them to the right person at the right time without having to page through multiple call schedules.

RESULTS:
Speedy and robust messaging directly to the covering hospitalist reduced wait times for admits, consults and discharges

By providing a tool for direct communication, PH Connect sped up provider to provider communication and completely removed the middle man, saving time while ensuring HIPAA compliance. Providers were able to transmit specific patient health information, eliminating generic pages and confusing code talk. In addition, the Hospitalist Service onboarded their APPs, Residents/Interns, Students and RN Care Coordinators, enabling care coordination throughout the entire hospitalist team via PH Connect.

The Hospitalist service participates in more than 12,000 messages a month and maintains an average response time of less than 4 minutes. With this breakthrough in communication timeliness, Hospitalists can communicate more effectively with the entire care team while strengthening patient care.