How Asia's Healthcare Innovators Boost Efficiency While Cutting Costs
Healthcare organizations are feeling the pinch as growing demand and tightening economic constraints force them to become more efficient. Nortel is helping Asia's most forward-looking organizations meet this challenge by leveraging unified communications solutions in innovative ways, as Gerard Anthony, Healthcare Solutions Leader with Nortel Asia, explains.
Hospitals have long dealt with mandates to treat more patients with fewer resources, but the new pressures of the global financial crisis have intensified the pressure they face. Yet in an industry where long-established procedures are often both time-consuming and inefficient, alleviating this pressure can be incredibly difficult.
Patients in Singapore, for example, typically wait up to seven hours for discharge checks to be completed, as nurses ring around to confirm final instructions with up to a dozen different healthcare providers and hospital services.
If hospitals were able to reduce the time this process takes, they could dramatically increase the number of patients that could be cared for every day. In Asia as in other regions, Nortel is helping make this happen by helping hospitals take advantage of smarter communications to optimize complex administrative processes – and realize significant cost savings in the process.
An innovative Nortel solution is making a big difference for a growing number of hospitals after a collaboration between Nortel and M.D. Anderson-Orlando Hospital produced a Patient Discharge Solution that, within three months, had halved the time it takes to discharge a patient. With one click on the hospital's electronic health information system (HIS), the Patient Discharge Solution automatically dials all parties involved in the patient's care – including specialist consultants, nurses, the pharmacy, physical therapy, housekeeping, transportation and even family members. Each party uses IVR to answer a series of prompts about the patient's preparedness to return home.
The benefits of the system are significant and obvious. Nurses avoid having to make up to a dozen calls per each discharge; patients go home sooner; and the hospital can get ready for the next patient sooner. Faster patient turnover translates into bottom-line benefits, with Nortel estimating that a 1700-bed hospital system can increase revenues by as much as $US11 million simply by increasing its patient turnover rate by 6000 discharges per year.
Patient Discharge Solution has joined Nortel's portfolio of healthcare industry solutions, providing an important tool in the effort to streamline hospital operations using modern technologies. Such tools are essential as Asian hospitals move to take advantage of Hyperconnectivity, the new era in communication in which everything and everyone that can be connected to a network, is connected. This 'culture of connectivity' has already turned many Asian countries into some of the world's most connected societies, making it easier for employees to communicate and collaborate than ever before.
Hyperconnected healthcare
A recent study of 167,000 patients in 72 general acute-care hospitals, published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine*, found that smarter healthcare systems not only save money, but can save lives too. In rating hospitals' IT automation rated on a scale of 0 to 100, researchers found that a 10-point increase in automation of medical notes and patient records was associated with a 15 percent decrease in deaths – decreasing mortality from 1.9 percent in low-automated hospitals to 1.4 percent in those with high degrees of automation. Cost savings on procedures like coronary artery bypass grafting was estimated at up to $US1729 per patient thanks to the same automation.
Little wonder that healthcare systems across Asia are pursuing smarter communications strategies that may start with electronic healthcare records, but are quickly expanding to encompass other innovative communications solutions. This can be seen in the growing trend towards medical tourism, a new competition-driven market in which numerous Asian hospitals invest in cutting-edge technologies and world-class medical expertise to offer high-quality patient care at lower cost than in comparable facilities elsewhere. According to industry research firm RNCOS, medical tourism generated $US3.4 billion in revenues for Asian economies in 2007 – leading destinations Thailand, Singapore, India, Malaysia and the Philippines treated 2.9 million medical tourists that year – and is expected to grow at more than 15 percent annually through 2010.
Meeting this growth, while keeping costs down to levels that keep them attractive, remains a key focus for Asian healthcare providers. To meet these goals, healthcare operators need to tap into new solutions that enable their staff to work increasingly efficiently and effectively.
Many organizations are finding the answers they need by pairing their existing HIS with state-of-the-art unified communications (UC) solutions. Japan's Kyushu University Hospital, for example, has improved patient care by fostering staff collaboration over a new medical information network based on Nortel's clinical-grade Healthcare Solutions portfolio. Saudi Arabia's King Fahad Medical City has embraced Nortel UC solutions to speed communications between healthcare workers and patients. And in Taiwan, the wireless Taiwan Mobile Healthcare Services give Taipei-based doctors virtual access to patient medical records, high-quality diagnostic images and video, and other innovative connectivity services.
Nortel is currently working with numerous Asian hospitals to implement Patient Discharge Solution, speeding their patient management processes and increasing overall efficiency. Others are exploring Nortel's solutions in areas such as Clinical Alarms and Alerts, Asset Management, and the Collaborative Clinical Solution, which also form part of Nortel's healthcare solutions portfolio. Still others – motivated by issues such as recent incidents in which Hong Kong patient data was lost by employees working from home – are looking into complementary solutions such as Nortel's Secure Portable Office, which simplifies secure access for remote workers in healthcare and other industries.
Built to heal
Asian healthcare providers are investing in healthcare IT faster than their peers around the world. Gartner recently predicted a 2.2 percent growth in healthcare IT spending across Asia, over four times faster than the overall IT growth rate of 0.5 percent. Yet good technology is only the beginning: because of their sheer size and mission-critical nature, changing processes in healthcare organizations takes time and commitment at every level. As the successful rollouts of Patient Discharge Solution and other Nortel healthcare solutions show, the right solutions can deliver real benefits when introduced into a socially and technologically receptive environment.
Since many Asian hospitals are relatively new, they may already have modern, high-speed internal networks and hospital information systems. However, many also have conventional communications systems that fail to take advantage of the synergies between HIS and unified communications. Nortel's Patient Discharge Solution provides this commonality of purpose, with or without the added benefits of a UC-capable PBX such as Nortel's Communication Server 1000 (CS1K).
With the CS1K in place, however, hospitals can not only deliver point applications but benefit from a fully communications-enabled HIS that links operational and communications systems so clinical decision-making can be supported and empowered by real-time communications. Nortel's Agile Communication Environment (ACE) delivers these efficiencies by providing easy access to key communications capabilities like click-to-call, instant messaging, location-based and presence-based applications.
Using a service oriented architecture built on Nortel communications technology, ACE allows healthcare organizations to speed the delivery of communications enabled applications (CEA) and communications enabled business processes (CEBP) that best leverage communications in the hyperconnected world. By being able to reach the right people, wherever they happen to be, ACE helps healthcare providers become smoother, faster, more relevant and more efficient.
The power of ACE is already improving patient outcomes for customers adopting a jointly developed solution from Carefx's Fusionfx software suite, which has integrated Nortel ACE to provide easy access to communications channels including click-to-call, instant messaging, SMS, email and others. When admitting a patient with chest pain, for example, hospital specialists can quickly establish contact with a patient's general practitioner and request prior patient ECG and cardiologist records – without picking up the phone. While Carefx coordinates patient management, ACE helps healthcare professionals work collaboratively throughout the course of the patient's treatment.
Even as doctors face more pressure than ever, patients expect and deserve the best possible healthcare available. That's why healthcare organizations that embrace the potential of the hyperconnected world will continue to stand head and shoulders above their peers and competitors. Early successes have confirmed the myriad possibilities of Nortel solutions, but for many healthcare providers – and their patients – the best is yet to come.
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