52% of healthcare organizations experience communications disconnects that negatively impact patients daily or multiple times a week, according to a recent study by TigerConnect.
These communication problems are more than a cause of frustration for healthcare employees. They make care coordination difficult and lead to lapses in care. In fact, the impact of poor communication is far reaching and affects the entire organization.
At best, communication inefficiency causes delays that increase the cost of healthcare provision. At worst, poor communication contributes to preventable medical errors, physician burnout and, in the most extreme cases, it can lead to death.
Many healthcare facilities are still heavily reliant on outdated communication technology such as pagers and fax machines. Groups of healthcare employees use different tools to communicate and, even with a growing mobile workforce, landlines are relied upon far too frequently.
TigerConnect research has shown that communication channels in hospitals are badly fragmented. 89% of hospitals are still using fax machines and 39% are still heavily reliant on pagers for communicating with certain departments, roles or, in the worst cases, organization-wide.
Even when modern communications technology is adopted, it is often implemented in silos. Physicians and nurses may be moved onto modern communications systems, but others are not. Consequently, the full benefits are not realized.
These communication problems are not only a source of frustration for healthcare employees, patients are also noticing. A Harris poll of patients conducted in August 2019 showed patients are frustrated by inefficient communication in healthcare during hospital stays, visits, and by the methods providers are using to communicate with them.
Fixing Broken Communication in Healthcare
TigerConnect will be hosting a webinar in which the extent of the communication problems in the U.S. healthcare industry will be discussed along with the problems that communication disconnects are causing.
Dr. Will O’Connor, CMIO, TigerConnect and Jorge Jeffery, Data Scientist & Researcher, will talk about these issues and will suggest a solution that will improve communication in healthcare, increase workflow efficiency, reduce common bottlenecks that are slowing patient throughput, and how improvements in communication can ensure more patients are seen in less time and the cost of healthcare provision can be reduced.
Webinar Details:
Topic: Fixing Broken Communications in Healthcare
Date: Thursday December 12, 2019
Time: 1.00 PM Eastern Time / 12:00 PM Central Time / 11:00 AM Mountain Time / 10.00 AM Pacific Time
Hosts: Dr. Will O’Connor, CMIO, TigerConnect / Jorge Jeffery, Data Scientist & Researcher
The Webinar will be followed by a Q&A session
You can sign up for the webinar here.
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