Contacting the Right Clinician: Solving the Miscommunication Crisis in Healthcare

Picture this: a nurse dialing multiple numbers, frustrated trying to find the right on-call physician, while critical minutes tick away, and patient care is delayed. In a 2023 Becker’s survey, 64 percent of nurse respondents cited difficulty contacting the right clinician as one of the top issues impacting clinical workflows. In fact, nurses can spend as much as an hour out of their shift on care team communication. It should be simple to find the right provider to contact, but more often than not it is a cumbersome process. The ramifications of contacting the wrong person can be serious as it delays care delivery and eats up clinicians’ valuable time. 

Collaboration Waste is all the glitches, delays and inefficiencies inherent in delivering care in a modern healthcare setting. Many people across multiple departments have to collaborate to move a patient through the system. The obstacles they encounter doing so can often look like individualized, distinct issues. However, Collaboration Waste is one huge issue that manifests itself in different ways. 

TigerConnect has identified seven different categories of Collaboration Waste. This blog will focus on “mis-contacting”, or contacting the wrong person, often due to outdated schedules

infographic collaborationwaste preview

Discover the 7 Types of Collaboration Waste

Collaboration Waste is hiding in plain sight. Learn how to spot it!

The schedule as a single point of failure 

It should be simple to answer the question: Who is on call? However, physician schedules are often out of date as soon as they are printed. It takes time to manually create or aggregate schedules for each department, disseminate them throughout the organization, and manage any updates. Many departments still use spreadsheets and paper schedules, which require manual updating every time shifts are swapped or changed. In the State of Clinical Communications and Workflows survey, results show that the top communication frustration clinicians expressed was contacting people outside their own unit. The second most cited point was using multiple systems that don’t interoperate. These challenges are due to inaccessible or outdated schedules, as providers struggle to contact who is on-call. 

Some hospitals rely on the chat tool in their electronic health records (EHR) system for communication, but this approach delivers a different version of the scheduling problem. For many EHR systems, you need to know exactly whom you’re trying to reach to use that contact function. In many cases, you don’t know the name, just the role – on-call pediatrician, charge nurse, etc. – that you’re trying to reach. Even if you know the right name, the EHR is not geared toward telling you if that person is even on duty. Your message might go to someone who won’t be in the hospital for a couple days rather than the on-call provider you need.  

Mis-contacting causes a myriad of pain points. Falling outside of policy timeframes, patient deterioration, care delays and clinician frustration are all symptoms of this inefficiency in collaboration.  

TigerConnect makes the right connections 

In healthcare, mis-contacting people is a form of Collaboration Waste. If clinicians are relying on a schedule, the schedule needs to be accurate, convenient and integrated with care team communication. 

The TigerConnect Clinical Collaboration Platform integrates with many leading scheduling software packages as well as our own, TigerConnect Physician Scheduling. Using Roles and Teams , you can contact the on-call provider in whichever department or specialty you need without knowing their name, as the system routes your call, text or video chat automatically. If you can’t talk in real time, you can simply send a secure message with patient context so that the on-call provider can take action at the earliest possible moment. With TigerConnect, having everyone using the same platform provides a single source of truth through real time updates. 

Together, we can map your workflows and identify the points of Collaboration Waste so we can address them to benefit patients and staff. Learn more about how TigerConnect can reduce or eliminate Collaboration Waste at your organization. 

Learn more about Clinical Collaboration Software Platform, Resident Scheduling Software, Physician Scheduling Software, Alarm Management & Event Notification Software & Patient Engagement Software.

Providence Saint John’s Health Center Case Study

Providence Saint John’s Health Center Improves Care Efficiency with Streamlined Communication