Healthcare Informatics

Overextended staff is the top concern among healthcare IT professionals surveyed recently concerning obstacles to providing better patient care. Avaya's survey found that respondents focused primarily on staff issues. Asked about the biggest challenge healthcare providers currently face, 32 percent cited “overextended clinical staff spending too much time performing non-patient care activities,” followed by "poor or lack of effective communication among staff," and "bottlenecks in patient flow." “We're seeing concerns among healthcare technology professionals about staffing and time being spent away from patients, which greatly impacts patient care and efficiency," said Gerard Dass, Avaya's Asia Pacific healthcare practice leader. "To address these challenges head-on, industry professionals are turning to communications solutions that drive faster and more productive collaboration, which makes all the difference in an industry where every...

While the need to rally teams quickly in your hospital is certainly not new, there are an increasing number of ways to reach the right people when time is of the essence. Although pagers were once the standard for simultaneous communications, now staff can specify a wide range of devices on which they can be contacted. For example, if you have a critical code, such as when a heart attack patient arrives, you probably have to let many people know that they will play a role in the very near future. The Cath Lab, cardiologists, nurses, lab technicians, and more can receive the appropriate message and respond with their availability. This is the key – being able to track responses easily and let alternate staff know if someone can’t make it. All of this can happen using common communications devices and systems such as smartphones, pagers, email, desk phones, and others. Logging all correspondence throughout the process also comes in handy when the Joint Commission asks for audit trails....

1. Know the rules. HIPAA's privacy prohibitions not only protect the disclosure of a patient's name and "individually identifiable health information," but also requires the safeguarding of any information where there is a "reasonable basis to believe it can be used to identify the individual." 2. Develop a social media policy. A social media policy, written in plain language, with clear dos and don'ts, should be established to provide guidance on what is and is not permitted. 3. Training. If physicians are going to use social media, they need to learn the tools, techniques and strategies of social media. An unintentional disclosure of information due to a misunderstanding about how a social network or mobile application works may have the same consequences for a doctor or institution as intentional disclosure. A doctor's staff should also be given training so that they are equally equipped to understand the rules of social media engagement. 4....

Loss of productivity is the top worry for doctors thinking about switching from paper medical records to electronic ones, according to a new survey by the Medical Group Management Association. The online survey drew responses from 4,588 practices, representing about 120,000 physicians. Of practices still using paper records, more than 78 percent feared there would be a "significant" to "very significant" loss of provider productivity during implementation, and two-thirds (67.4 percent) had similar concerns about the loss of physician productivity after the EHR transition period. The practices still using paper medical records described the other significant to very significant barriers to EHR adoption as “insufficient capital resources to invest in an EHR” (71.7 percent) and “insufficient expected return on investment” (56.9 percent). "The EHR incentive program seeks to address implementation costs, a critical barrier to medical groups' adoption of E...