Imagine this scene – a nurse station is buzzing loudly in the Emergency Department. The on-call nurse is on hold with the operator to locate a cardiologist for her patient — multiple alarms ring, ding, and buzz from the station. After several minutes, the operator finds the right cardiologist and sends him a page. While the nurse waits for her page to be returned, she repeats this process for four other patients.
Things aren’t much different in non-acute settings, either, with delays in communications and employees texting via SMS or using other non-HIPAA-compliant solutions.
These aren’t scenes from the past. Today, many healthcare workers still depend on archaic technology like pagers, landline telephones, and fax machines to coordinate patient care. Additionally, on-call physician schedules are printed and distributed out to care teams or managed with whiteboards. Then updated. And redistributed. Over and over. This method of communication and collaboration is not only inefficient but also compromises patient care.
But what if you could enhance workflows and communication for health systems by leveraging care collaboration to put the patient at the center of care?
TigerConnect Product Suite
Discover the value of upgrading to a clinical collaboration platform.
This powerful collaboration platform is what we are excited to reveal.
TigerConnect has expanded our product suite, building on the nation’s most widely deployed Clinical Collaboration solution with a true platform of collaboration services that enhance patient care.
The TigerConnect Portfolio:
- TigerConnect Clinical Collaboration Platform (Standard, Pro, & Advanced)
- TigerConnect Alarm Management & Event Notification
- TigerConnect Physician Scheduling
- TigerConnect Patient Engagement
The addition of more compassionate patient and family engagement options, plus intelligent alarm and event notification solutions along with physician scheduling, help ensure healthcare systems of all sizes, hospitals already stretched thin with clinical staffing shortages, do not compromise patient care and safety.
Beyond Secure Messaging
Now picture that same nurse or surgery center admin using a clinical collaboration platform to quickly find and message the right care team member. With role-focused messaging linked to real-time shift schedules, she can get the right message to the right person at the right time.
The TigerConnect Clinical Collaboration Platform provides a flexible foundation for healthcare collaboration and the ability to add Pro and Advanced capabilities for unique healthcare workflow and systems interactions.
TigerConnect goes beyond secure messaging by empowering healthcare workers to message staff by role with escalations that route unanswered messages to backup staff or activate Rapid Response – saving steps, accelerating care, and improving patient outcomes. With patient data from the EHR and secure communications combined on one platform, care teams can collaborate in a single endpoint resulting in optimized workflows and higher patient satisfaction.
Engage with Patients in a Human Way
Similar issues arise when the care team needs to communicate with the patient or their family. Barriers to the various forms of patient engagement are a significant cause of frustration and stress for care teams. This is the same challenge shared by large health systems, small private practices, and everything in between, such as messaging a patient to schedule their appointments, checking in to see if they are following their care plan, or ensuring key critical updates reach family members are all barriers to providing the best patient care.
Clinicians need an easy way to communicate with patients, free from confusing portals and passwords. TigerConnect Patient Engagement removes communication hurdles by connecting clinicians with patients in a single app using video, voice, and secure text. A simple SMS link brings patients into a secure, encrypted conversation to ask questions, send or receive attachments, and chat with providers.
The solution makes it easy to provide loved ones with updates during a procedure, conduct remote wound care follow-ups, and drive post-visit care plan adherence. Easy and open patient communication benefits care plan adherence and lower readmission rates.
It’s also essential to enable clinicians to efficiently manage patient communication, particularly when presented with urgent messages. The TigerConnect welcome lobby streamlines patient visits by allowing clinicians to view and prioritize the active patient queue, update statuses, and notify providers when a patient is ready. This strategy works equally well in smaller office settings and telehealth practices and has full data integration capabilities and extensibility to meet the unique needs of all healthcare organizations.
Contextual Awareness Drives Better Decisioning
But what about the inbound patient information the nurse requires to provide excellent care, not simply the outbound communication they help facilitate?
Currently, health systems route alarms to the assigned RNs via their mobile device without any context into whether they are or are not actionable. This not only contributes to nurse burnout and alarm fatigue but also impacts responsiveness and patient safety.
And in non-acute settings, such as rehab facilities or outpatient surgery centers, alerts and alarms can cause similar challenges for nursing staff. The reduction of unnecessary clinical interruptions is a patient safety goal shared by nearly every healthcare setting.
TigerConnect Alarm Management & Event Notification consumes alerts/alarms from nurse call systems, physiological monitors, smart beds, EHR, and more to intelligently route actionable, context-rich notifications to caregivers on their mobile devices.
This improvement alone dramatically reduces unnecessary clinical interruptions, alarm fatigue, and sentinel events by separating the signal from the noise, helping to keep already lean nursing teams productive and less prone to burnout.
Streamline On-Call Scheduling
So, now that the care team has all the tools to share the right information at the right time.
However, they still need to contend with making sure that information reaches the right person. Scheduled shifts and swaps can occur without notice for many health systems. A solution is needed for hospitals managing their on-call schedule as well as the other 22,000 ambulatory practices that submit their on-call physicians information to the hospitals.
Ensuring the right person in the right role receives timely data is the final part of the equation.
For practices providing on-call physician services for hospitals, TigerConnect simplifies the process of creating and sharing on-call assignments to the unit coordinator or administrative liaison at the appropriate healthcare facility.
Built for practices of any size, TigerConnect Physician Schedule algorithms ensure fairness in on-call shift assignments and prevent burnout by including sufficient time between shifts. Pre-built workflows mean less work for administrative teams, resulting in greater cost savings.
Automating the on-call physician scheduling process and fusing it with clinical communications allows care teams to share critical details within a team of collaborators. From large hospitals to ambulatory and outpatient practices, TigerConnect enables easy on-call scheduling within the entire organization or across multiple office locations and clinics. This ultimately streamlines time-off requests, shift swaps, and calendar access on a smartphone or desktop. This removes stress from managers, ensures fairness in schedules, and reduces burnout from overworked clinicians.
The Evolution From Texting to Communication Suite
A modern clinical collaboration and communication platform is much more than a messaging solution. At the end of the day, a busy nurse doesn’t just want to text back and forth with a physician. Bringing contextual awareness into the conversation with real-time lab results helps all members of the care team coordinate care. Escalating messages to the current on-call physician and routing alarms to the appropriate provider are just some examples that streamline workflows and result in better patient care.
That is the TigerConnect central mission: to connect caregivers across facilities and health systems. The updated TigerConnect Portfolio cements that mission by connecting clinicians with each other and with the systems and data they rely upon. It removes chaotic noise from workflows and transforms that noise into needed context. At its core, it integrates communication within all systems to improve collaboration, reduce burnout, improve patient outcomes, and connect clinicians with patients in a meaningful way.
Learn more about the TigerConnect Portfolio here.