Study on the Economic Impact of Inefficient Communications in Healthcare

Efficient communication and collaboration amongst physicians, nurses and other providers is critical to the coordination and delivery of patient care, especially given the increasingly mobile nature of today’s clinicians and the evolution of the accountable care organization (ACO) model.

For healthcare IT leadership, the ability to satisfy the clinical need for more efficient communications technologies must be balanced with safeguarding protected health information (PHI) to meet compliance and security requirements. As a result, the industry continues to rely primarily on pagers, which creates inefficiencies that can have a considerable economic and productivity impact.

To quantify this impact, the Imprivata Report on the Economic Impact of Inefficient Communications in Healthcare worked with the Ponemon Institute to survey more than 400 healthcare providers in the U.S. about the typical communications process during three clinical workflows: patient admissions, coordinating emergency response teams and patient transfers.

This report is chalk full of good information on the communication challenges in healthcare. Here’s one example chart from the report:
Wasted Time in Hospitals Due to Poor Communication

While it’s good to see that 52% think pagers are not efficient, I’d hope that the number were much higher. I think that most don’t realize how inefficient a pager really is to their organization. It’s interesting that 39% don’t allow text messaging, but it would be interesting to see how many of the 61% that allow text messaging use a secure text message solution.

I think the use of technology to facilitate communication in healthcare is one of the most exciting opportunities out there today. Certainly we have to be careful to follow HIPAA, but we need to not use HIPAA as an excuse for why we don’t use the technology to facilitate better communication.

There’s a lot more in the report that’s worth a read. I’m sure I’ll be covering more details of the report in the future.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories