Optimized Clinical Workflows: The Key to Improving Job Satisfaction and Reducing Burnout

As healthcare professionals, we all know that the current healthcare system can be stressful and challenging. From managing patient care to collaborating with other clinicians and coordinating with various departments, it can be overwhelming. According to a survey conducted by Medscape, almost half of physicians report feeling burned out, and this can be attributed to several factors, including excessive workload, lack of control over schedules, and time spent on administrative tasks. Inefficient clinical workflows also contribute to job dissatisfaction and burnout rates among healthcare professionals. That’s why optimizing clinical workflows is crucial for improving job satisfaction and reducing burnout. 

Address communication breakdowns 

One of the main benefits of optimizing clinical workflows is improved communication and collaboration between care teams. Studies have shown that communication breakdowns are one of the leading causes of medical errors, which can have severe consequences for both patients and healthcare providers. Miscommunication or lack of timely communication is a major contributor to serious safety events such as medication errors, patient falls, or delayed critical lab results. Optimizing clinical workflows can help address these problems by improving communication and collaboration between care teams, resulting in reduced serious safety events. With the right tools and resources, healthcare professionals can easily communicate with each other, share information, and collaborate on patient care. This can lead to reduced costs, fewer readmissions, decreased patient length of stay, and ultimately better patient outcomes. 

Improve provider burnout 

When healthcare professionals are constantly navigating communication breakdowns and struggling to coordinate care, they can become overwhelmed and frustrated. Inefficient communication and disjointed care coordination across a variety of systems can lead to decreased job satisfaction and increased burnout rates among healthcare providers. Optimizing clinical workflows can alleviate frustration connected to poor communication by providing healthcare professionals with a simple method to communicate in real time across various departments. This can help reduce delays in care delivery, remove stress, and improve job satisfaction. 

Optimize workflows with clinical communication and collaboration 

Clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) platforms can help improve communication between care teams and streamline clinical workflows. Modern CC&C platforms allow for real-time communication by role or team, faster consultations, and an enhanced care delivery process that ensures all care team members are on the same page. This, in turn, leads to reduced administrative burden on care teams, improved patient care, and better outcomes. 

Advanced CC&C platforms are quickly becoming the standard for hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities, and the reason for this shift is simple – it works. Care team members can easily share critical patient information, such as lab results, medication orders, and care plans, and collaborate on care decisions in real time. As a result, healthcare organizations using CC&C platforms have seen significant improvements in clinical efficiency, reduced readmissions, and shorter patient lengths of stay. 

How Tigerconnect enhances clinical workflows  

The TigerConnect Clinical Collaboration Platform was designed to help healthcare professionals streamline workflows, improve communication and collaboration, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. With TigerConnect, healthcare professionals can easily find and contact providers across different departments or facilities and communicate by role, without needing to know the person’s name. Care team members can communicate via secure messaging, voice, or video calls to seamlessly collaborate on patient care in real time. In addition, TigerConnect offers customizable and automated clinical workflows to help maximize efficiency and reduce administrative burden on care teams.  

TigerConnect also integrates with other healthcare technology systems, such as electronic health records (EHR), laboratory information systems (LIS), and nurse calls, allowing for seamless information sharing and care coordination.  

Inpatient Consult Workflow 

A typical hospital’s inpatient consult workflow can take 36 minutes to complete while providers search schedules or call the operator to locate the right on-call consulting provider. With an integration between TigerConnect and a hospital’s EHR, when a consult order is placed STAT, an automated message is sent to the on-call specialist with all the appropriate EHR context. The consult order in the EHR triggers a group message between the requesting provider and the on-call consulting provider. Near real-time notification of the consult request with TigerConnect significantly speeds up the workflow and reduces the notification time to just 6 minutes. 

Critical Lab Workflow 

Integrating TigerConnect with a hospital’s EHR or LIS enables automated notifications which can improve critical lab notification time. When a critical lab result is flagged via the EHR or LIS, a message is automatically triggered to the ordering provider and nursing staff to acknowledge and review the results. Automating the notification process allows for faster turnaround time for patient interventions, reducing the risk of patient harm, and improving patient outcomes. With TigerConnect, the notification time has been shown to drop to 2.5 minutes. 

By utilizing TigerConnect to optimize workflows, healthcare organizations can better support staff by enabling seamless information sharing and eliminating the need to make phone calls to find the right provider. To learn more about how your healthcare organization can utilize the best medical technology to fit your needs, check out this guide to Leveraging Modern Communication Technologies to Improve Workflows. 

Ryan Bush, MSN, RN-BC, Clinical Nurse Consultant

Ryan Bush is a Clinical Nurse Consultant at TigerConnect with over 14 years of experience in a variety of healthcare roles including bedside nurse, clinical applications analyst and most recently a manager of nursing informatics for the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH. Ryan holds a Masters and board certification in the field of Nursing Informatics.

Tags: care coordination, Clinical Workflows