Healthcare providers have a wide range of incredibly advanced care tools at their disposal; however, many hospitals and clinics are still reliant on antiquated, unconnected communication systems. There have been major advances in communications technology in recent years which have been successfully implemented in many industry sectors to improve communication, collaboration, efficiency, and productivity, yet these have taken time to be introduced in the highly regulated healthcare industry. To this day, healthcare providers are still reliant on pagers, faxes, landline telephones, and white boards. These unconnected communication systems are inefficient and hamper healthcare workflows and ultimately significantly add to the cost of healthcare provision.
Over the past decade, new tools have come to market to replace these outdated and unconnected communication systems. Secure text messaging platforms have been developed for use in healthcare that greatly improve communication efficiently, while incorporating all the necessary safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic protected health information to meet the requirements of HIPAA. Secure text messaging solutions for healthcare have evolved into comprehensive clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) systems that integrate with a wide range of other systems, including EHRs, to meet the emerging needs that tomorrow’s network of interconnected healthcare organizations demands.
TigerConnect is the most adopted platform for advanced care team collaboration and clinical integrations in the United States and includes a suite of tools for improving efficiency throughout the healthcare continuum. This week, TigerConnect has announced it has significantly expanded and enhanced the TigerConnect portfolio to further improve efficiency, quality, outcomes, and the overall patient and provider experience.
“The newly enhanced TigerConnect portfolio empowers healthcare organizations of all sizes to solve complex workflows and communications scenarios from end to end, beginning with a significantly enhanced care collaboration platform,” explained TigerConnect “From there, enhancement technologies include simpler, more compassionate patient and family engagement options. Plus, improved alert and event notification and scheduling solutions help ensure hospitals already stretched thin with clinical staffing shortages do not compromise patient care and safety.”
The TigerConnect portfolio of HITRUST CSF-certified, HIPAA-compliant solutions includes TigerConnect Clinical Collaboration Platform, TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notifications, TigerConnect Patient Engagement, and TigerConnect Physician Scheduling.
At the heart of the suite is the CC&C platform that enables instant, secure communication between patients and clinicians, real-time delivery of results to caregivers, communication between teams, and more via text, voice, and video. The platform empowers staff to securely identify and communicate with colleagues across shifts, improving communication efficiency. Additionally, unanswered messages are automatically escalated, thus saving steps, accelerating care, and improving a wide range of organizational outcomes.
TigerConnect has expanded its middleware capabilities with Alarm Management and Event Notifications, which allow nurse teams to consume, prioritize and route contextualized alerts and alarm notifications from any nurse station, physiologic monitor, smart bed, or EHR vendor. “This improvement dramatically reduces unnecessary clinical interruptions, alarm fatigue, and sentinel events by separating the signal from the noise, helping to keep already lean nursing teams productive and less prone to burnout,” explained TigerConnect.
TigerConnect has also enhanced its platform for better patient engagement, which helps busy healthcare professionals bypass traditional outreach challenges, giving fast, easy, and direct access to patients and their families. The platform can be used to send appointment reminders, collect intake documents before a visit, provide patients families with updates during a procedure, conduct remote wound care follow-ups, and drive post-visit care plan adherence, with the solution providing itself to be invaluable for delivering telehealth services during the pandemic.
Through TigerConnect Physician Scheduling, the on-call and resident scheduling process has been automated, streamlined, and fused with clinical communications to ensure care teams know which doctor or physician’s assistant to contact at all times without having to consult printed schedules or whiteboards, and also share key details within a team of collaborators. This recently added feature ultimately streamlines time-off requests, shift swaps, and calendar access on a smartphone or desktop.
“Much as enterprise collaboration platforms have fundamentally transformed how businesses collaborate around people, data and integrations, TigerConnect is now revolutionizing healthcare collaboration,” said Brad Brooks, CEO and co-founder, TigerConnect. “Care organizations can communicate and collaborate securely and safely, while absolutely protecting patient privacy in the cloud. This revolution is just beginning as more healthcare data and integrations move to the cloud, and we are proud to be leading the way with platforms and solutions that will enable people and automate workflows.”
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