Is your healthcare institution doing all it can do to mitigate against sentinel events?
Evan Bossonis
Business Development Leader, Team Lead - Unified Communications
A sentinel event is defined by The Joint Commission (TJC) as: “any unanticipated event in a healthcare setting resulting in death or serious physical or psychological injury to a patient or patients, not related to the natural course of the patient's illness.”
“Ineffective communication is the most frequently cited root cause for sentinel events. Effective communication that is timely, accurate, complete, unambiguous, and understood by the recipient reduces error and results in improved patient safety.” - 2009 Joint Commission (TJC) - Hospital National Patient Safety Goals.
As EMR systems become the hub of medical information flow, from patient historical data to clinical data, from radiological data to prescription data, they reduce the probability of human communication accuracy error. The problem that remains is that of timely communications. Most EMR systems have a very limited set of tools to facilitate timely and prioritized delivery of clinical results, patient status, etc., that are critical in avoiding sentinel events. As hospital staff and specialists are innately mobile (within the hospital, between hospitals, and outside the hospital setting), delivery of these notifications to mobile devices, with appropriate priority (as these devices invariably carry non-critical messages as well as critical), and over multiple networks becomes essential.
In this era of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), it is equally important that a hospital’s staff and specialists receive timely EMR notifications on the mobile devices they bring to the organization, such as smartphones, tablets, and notebooks. Specialized wireless devices that serve as phones and pagers (or more accurately, pager replacements), and leverage the hospital’s WiFi infrastructure, must also support these notifications. In fact, great efficiencies can be achieved by delivering not only notifications, but the full computer desktop, including the EMR to the mobile device.
Best of breed solutions for each of these capabilities exist, but are not supplied by a single manufacturer. These solutions rest on a foundation of integrated IP Telephony and Virtual Desktop infrastructure. Choosing the right technology partner can bring a world-class, fully-integrated, system of communications tools to ensure real-time critical message delivery to your institution – a system customized to your institutions workflow processes, and leveraging your current technology investments.
Learn about how IPLogic can bring solutions to maximize patient care, including critical notifications delivery and mobile EMR access, to your institution by visiting http://www.iplogic.com/healthcare-solutions.asp or by reaching out to me at ebossonis@iplogic.com.
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