More organizations are looking to implement clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) platforms as part of their long-term digital transformation. CC&C solutions are exceptionally low-cost investments that deliver high ROI results and provide the right metrics.
A vital feature of any CC&C platform’s transformative potential is the ability to convert metadata, metrics, and statistics into compelling, actionable, timely, and data-driven insights.
For example, your management team may want to demonstrate value in terms that make sense for your organization. Such metrics may include increased responsiveness, reduced length of stay, faster results routing, improved patient safety and satisfaction, reduction of alarm fatigue, more expedient pharmacy refills, and higher bed utilization.
TigerConnect Technical Buyer’s Guide
How to Understand the Care Team Collaboration Market
A CC&C solution with comprehensive reporting tools can provide compelling insights to your clinical leadership and administrative teams. These insights can improve workflows, streamline communications and care team collaboration, reduce alarm fatigue, and create supportive environments for clinical teams.
The right metrics allow you to see:
Correlations between employee adoption of your CC&C platform and high-level organizational goals like improved patient satisfaction and lower readmission rates
Insights into how faster response times from your clinical staff lead to better patient outcomes and satisfaction
Empirical data demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of clinical workflow, in real-time and retrospectively
The right vendor solution eliminates obstacles that hinder your clinical staff. Let’s examine the metrics that will help you tell an inspiring story, which in turn enables actionable, timely, data-driven governance.
Key Considerations
When choosing a clinical communication solution, it’s helpful to review your mission statement. Your mission statement will dictate the level of richness you need in your platform’s reporting and analytics tools, as well as the types of metrics you’ll need to track.
For example, if your mission statement is to improve life in a healing environment, then you’ll be well-served by message volume metrics, such as the number of messages sent, delivered, and read each week.
Suppose your mission is to improve patient health and reduce healthcare spend through collaboration, coordination, and communication. In that case, you’d need a platform with real-time, comprehensive analytic tools that offer coordination among clinicians, care teams, and patients.
Three Types of Reporting
It’s helpful to split reporting infrastructures into three groups. You can then leverage these groups of data to support objective, actionable, and timely governance decisions.
Today-Focused
First, there’s today-focused reporting. Use it when you want to monitor recent activity. Today-focused reporting is common to most secure CC&C solutions and is helpful for the organization represented by the first mission statement above.
Nurture-Focused
Nurture-focused uses advanced reporting to detect trends and formulate deeper insights into adoption, engagement, and usage of integrated systems, as well as gaps in training. These reports enable compelling, data-driven analytics that can bring focus, purpose, and unity to your organization’s care team communication strategy.
Insight-Focused
The third group of reports focuses on data insights derived from the management of clinical workflow and care team collaboration. Clinical leaders can monitor, trend, and compare patient experience and responsiveness metrics by health system, region, hospital, unit, room, patient, or caregiver, informing their decision-making and process improvement planning.
Questions to Ask
Here are some questions you may want to ask the vendors you’re considering.
Describe your reporting and analytics tools. What are the options in terms of timing and groups of users?
Can we report on the number of provisioned, activated, and active users?
Can we report on the number of messages sent, delivered, recalled, read, forwarded, expired, and archived?
Final Thoughts
A good CC&C platform streamlines workflows, creating the foundation of clinical communication and collaboration between caregivers, allied health, and administrative users, leading to better patient outcomes.
Check out our technical buyer’s guide, clarifying essential elements for IT and clinical decision-makers to consider when selecting a CC&C platform. Feel free to reach out to us any time with questions or to request a demo.
Will O’Connor, M.D. is the Chief Medical Information Officer at TigerConnect. As a physician executive with more than 20 years of healthcare experience, Will is a passionate advocate for rapid advancement across the healthcare industry.
