Solutions | Healthcare
Visual Paging
- Hits: 238
A hospital requires a visual solution to quickly notify its staff of newborn abductions, code blue events, and other recognized emergencies without audibly paging throughout the facilities. While sounding alarms is an effective way of broadcasting notifications, the hospital is trying to insulate its patients from any unnecessary noise and events they may find disturbing or upsetting. The hospital currently has IP phones located at nurses stations, acute care wards, security desks, and in the hands of the main care givers. They want to use this investment for this solution.
Solving this challenge will benefit the hospital in the following ways:
- Maintaining a peaceful atmosphere as patients recuperate has been found to improve patient satisfaction, directly impacting its national rankings
- A higher national ranking drives higher endowments and funding from philanthropists
- An environment conducive to recuperation shortens post-op admittance, increasing profit and decreasing the risk for additional patient complications
- Visual, color coded notifications on IP phones drives immediate response and acknowledgement from staff
- A consolidation of network communication devices and infrastructure, leveraging VoIP, reduces the IT department’s maintenance costs and possible head count
Solution
The focus of this solution is using color graphic images to the screen of IP phones to indicate certain types of emergency situations.
- Using the clinic’s own telephony infrastructure, dial patients’ home phones, cell phones, or work phones reminding them of their upcoming appointments.
- Call patients as far in advance as needed based on the time needed to prepare for planned procedures during the visit.
- Schedule calls to occur with enough time to refill any cancellations.
- Receive acknowledgement when placing calls to patients, providing the following options
- Available colors supported by IP phones allows the hospital to configure various contrasting shades to represent various types of emergencies through application administrative interfaces
- Because every second counts in a newborn abduction or a code blue situation, a speed dial button is programmed to initiate the notification, providing a one-touch interface
- Gradual shade changes can be used to indicate changes in the severity of the situation, with each shade being driven by dialing an internal extension, selecting a speed dial button or icon
- A user hits a speed dial button or an icon reserved for indicating a specific type of emergency, changing the entire screen of a group of targeted phones a certain color
- The color filled phone screen representing a specific type of emergency is refreshed every five to seven seconds, indicating the emergency situation still persists
- A user hits a speed dial button or an icon reserved for clearing emergencies, changing the entire screen of a group of targeted phones to a certain color
- The targeted phones are selected according to what speed dial button or icon is selected or what extension is entered
Patient Appointment Reminders
- Hits: 339
A clinic of 9 family practice physician’s outsources their patient reminder notifications to an outside service. Each physician typically has 4-5 patients who are not able to confirm an appointment for that day, but would gladly come in if another patient cancels as long as they have close to a day advance notice. Unfortunately the outsource service does not send the cancelled appointment notifications to the physician’s until 9:00am the morning of the appointment. The group practice is losing approximately $3,000 of revenue a day because of not being able to give advance notice to the “wait list” patients. They have a phone system with 100 users.
Solving this challenge will benefit the practice in the following ways:
- Automated patient reminders now generated from the group practice, thus saving outsourcing fee of approximately $2,200
- Patients now on the “waiting an appointment due to cancellation list” can be automatically notified the night before when an appointment becomes available the next day. By notifying patients the evening before, versus the morning of the appointment, it will significantly increase the number of wait list patients who will now be able to fill the open appointment slots. This advance notice will generate approximately $1,500 a day of new revenue for the clinic.
- Improved patient care and good will.
- Estimated return on investment: 3 months
Solution
The solution focuses on providing an appointment reminder system that results in more patients treated on a daily basis
- Using the clinic’s own telephony infrastructure, dial patients’ home phones, cell phones, or work phones reminding them of their upcoming appointments.
- Call patients as far in advance as needed based on the time needed to prepare for planned procedures during the visit.
- Schedule calls to occur with enough time to refill any cancellations.
- Receive acknowledgement when placing calls to patients, providing the following options
- Connect to a receptionist or nurse for questions concerning any preparations for the visit such as fasting before blood work, assuring a billable visit
- Connect to receptionist or nurse to reschedule an appointment in case of a cancellation
- Confirm patient plans to attend supporting clinic policy of charging for visit without cancellation notice
- Call patients using their preferred language, assuring the message is understood and well received
- Provide results report of calls placed to patients for review or export to a worksheet file for further analysis
- Use the solution to broadcast public service announcements such as start of flu season, ozone conditions, etc., increasing their well being and satisfaction
Monitoring Refrigeration Performance
- Hits: 239
A refrigeration unit in a hospital’s kitchen goes down Friday night around 9:00pm. The monitoring system sends an email to the desktop of management, but the email is not viewed until the following morning. How long has the temperature been out of threshold? Without knowing, the hospital must discard the food to prevent food poisoning in patients and the cafeteria.
Solving this challenge will benefit the hospital in the following ways:
- Faster response to failing refrigeration units and extended lifespan of the units
- Cost savings in reduction of spoiled foods
- Automatic and accurate notification of emergency events after hours will result in a reduction of stand-by employee’s
- Reduction in potential liability from food poisoning and food inspector auditing
- Improved community status and image of the hospital
Solution
The focus of this solution is meeting the challenge of reaching the right people, over the right mediums, with the right message, at the right time. Particular to this challenge is interfacing with an external monitoring system to receive alerts and disseminate them as needed.
- Interface with third party monitoring systems, including temperature, moisture, UPS, fire, smoke, motion, etc. to be able to disseminate alerts as needed
- Create rules based on time of day and type of alert to assure message is sent to the right technician over the right medium
- Send an alert to an IP phone and desktop monitor during normal hours of operation; send the same alert to a home phone as a dial out and cell phone as a text message after normal hours of operation
- Monitor acknowledgements from first responders to confirm alerts are being addressed in a timely manner
- From an off-network phone, start an ad-hoc conference call to ensure your technicians are coordinated in addressing serious failures; maintain an open bridge to continue communicating until the incident is resolved
Increasing Operating Room Communications
- Hits: 319
A hospital wants to increase efficiencies in their operating rooms by providing a way for surgeons to communicate directly with the technicians in the hospital laboratories. Currently, a nurse needs to exit the operating room and physically walk down to the lab to deliver tissue samples for immediate biopsies. The hospital wants to create a means of communication between the operating and labs to summon a technician instead of losing the manpower of an operating nurse.
Solving this challenge will benefit the hospital in the following ways:
- Improved efficiencies in finishing up surgery and moving patients to recovery
- Enhanced Patient care because the nurses can remain on hand in the operating rooms
- Improved experience for family members awaiting news as the surgeon can finish up faster and meet with the family in a more timely fashion
- Increased quality control since technicians can speak directly to the surgeon, thereby reducing the potential for errors in misunderstood lab requests.
Solution
The focus of this solution is to create a means of communication through multiple touch points between the operating room and laboratories without long interruptions for the surgeon or requiring a nurse to leave the operating room.
- When the surgeon or nurse needs to contact a lab technician, they press a pre-configured speed dial button on their high-end Cisco IP phone.
- A pre-configured text and text-to-speech message is sent to the laboratory technician. This message can also be configured to send additional alerts such as email, pc alert or dial-out notification.
- The lab technician can reply back with a pre-configured text and text-to-speech message by pressing a speed dial button on their IP phone.
- If a technician is not available, or they need additional information from the operating room, the IPcelerate intercom feature can be invoked to open a live, 2-way communication with the surgeon.
- The phone in the operating room can automatically go off-hook, allowing the surgeon to easily communicate with the technician and still maintain focus on the patient.
Increasing Billing Accuracy
- Hits: 250
A doctor’s office has been struggling with inaccurate billing codes. By not entering the correct code up front, the administrative staff is forced into weekend reconciliations, which cost overtime and delay billings.
Solving this challenge will benefit the medical practice in the following ways:
- Improve patient satisfaction and loyalty through accurate billing processes
- Increase timeliness of payments from insurance companies by reducing contested charges
- Increase productivity of records department personnel by reducing needless processes
- Through more realistic and accurate billing data, the practice has a better indication of its current business status and any changes that should be made
Solution
The focus of this solution is the integration of patient databases and billing applications through the IP phone, streamlining the process of applying patient/treatment billing codes.
- At the touch of a button, provide the user a list of recent calls and visitations to choose from and associate a patient matter code.
- Based on the call or visitation selected, provide the user with a list of valid codes to reduce incorrect entries.
- Based on call/visitation selected, provide a default billing code to simplify/shorten interaction with application.
- Associate picture ID with call/visitation detail identifying patient visually and decreasing incorrect patient/matter code selections.
- A back-end operation automatically posts patient calls/matter codes to a billing application for further processing.
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