In healthcare, every second counts. But are today’s hospitals able to get the information they need quickly and efficiently in order to deliver the best care in an urgent situation? Earlier this year, Dr. Will O’Connor, MD, CMIO at TigerConnect, spoke with Natalie Zfat, social media entrepreneur and Forbes Contributor, to discuss how TigerConnect is taking healthcare communications into the mobile era. Here is their conversation:
Natalie Zfat: What are some of the challenges that clinical teams are facing with the existing communications technology?
Dr. Will O’Connor: There are a couple of challenges. First, it is very hard to find the person you are looking for at the right time. If you have a specific patient you are treating, trying to connect with the patient’s primary care physician, a nurse, or consultant in a timely manner is almost impossible with the outdated technology in most hospitals today. The second challenge is the lack of a healthcare communications infrastructure. If I am at hospital “A” I don’t really have a good way of connecting with someone in hospital “B.”
Zfat: How has TigerConnect messaging evolved to integrate with EMR systems?
O’Connor: Our messaging system is able to integrate with EMRs in a couple of ways. First, we are able to pull patient information into TigerConnect, which helps health practitioners identify who the patient is so they can have patient-centered conversations. The other thing we can do with an EMR is to actually take some critical data and bring it into TigerConnect. For example, instead of sending critical lab data to an EMR inbox where it might take a long time to be read, we can send that alert right to mobile phones of those who need it. They get an alert and are able to address that patient’s need much more quickly.
Zfat: As mobile devices become more and more essential to healthcare, what are some of the best practices you can share about deployment and security?
O’Connor: TigerConnect’s partnership with Samsung is allowing us to leverage the Knox Platform. This enables our clients to seamlessly log into TigerConnect on their Samsung devices. And what we find is that the easier it is for employees to log in and use the application, the more they are going to use it.
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