Podcast
Redefining Scheduling and Communication at Tufts Medical Center
Dr. Michael Davis of Tufts Medical Center shares how Tufts Medical Center integrates scheduling and communication.
July 28th, 2022 – EP 22 with Dr. Michael Davis, director of Inpatient Systems for the Department of Medicine at Tufts Medical Center
In this episode of The Connected Care Team podcast, Dr. Michael Davis, director of Inpatient Systems for the Department of Medicine at Tufts Medical Center, shares how Tufts integrates secure messaging and scheduling to improve clinical communication.
Closed-Loop Communication
A critical requirement for effective value-based care is patient communication. Communicating with patients in an easy, accessible, and meaningful way can transform patient experiences.
Tufts Medical Center implemented TigerConnect for smoother communication and coordination within the organization. Dr. Davis noted that compared to pagers, secure messaging from TigerConnect provides natural closed-loop communication. With pagers, clinicians have no way of knowing if their page has been received. But with TigerConnect, clinicians know immediately when a message has been read.
“So you have those read receipts, you know exactly what state your message is in. You can see whether it was sent or not. You can see whether it was delivered. And then finally you can see whether it’s been read and that read receipt is hugely helpful in supporting this natural form of closed-loop communication.”
Dr. Michael Davis
A Single Directory for Call Schedules
Tufts Medical Center also uses TigerConnect Physician Scheduling to have call schedules feed roles in the app. This allows Tufts to provide a single directory across all departments that is easily accessible. Staff no longer need to know the person inhabiting a role to coordinate patient care.
“You don’t need to know who the cardiology consultant is at any given time. All you need to do is pick your phone up and search for cardiology consultant, and then you can message them directly.”
Dr. Michael Davis
Decentralizing the Scheduling Process for Bidirectional Communication
Dr. Davis was a chief resident of a 76-resident program for internal medicine at Tufts – so he understands the complexity of creating resident and physician schedules. Using TigerConnect Physician Scheduling has enabled Tufts Medical Center to dramatically reduce the amount of work spent on scheduling by executive administrators and program coordinators.
“When somebody takes over a role in TigerConnect, that automatically then gets fed back into the [schedule] directory that the rest of the hospital sees to see who’s on call. So that bidirectional communication between the messenger app and the call scheduler has been very helpful.”
Dr. Michael Davis
Related:
- Connect with Dr. Michael Davis on LinkedIn
- Learn more about TigerConnect Resident Scheduling
- Follow TigerConnect on LinkedIn for episodes, announcements, and news
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