Improving Workflow in Healthcare

Hospital management spends a huge amount of time improving workflows in healthcare. One of the chief aims is to optimize the return on investment without neglecting the needs of all patients. One of the key ways of achieving this is to optimize the workflows in clinics, hospitals and medical centers.

This is not easy. A lot of decisions made by senior management in order to achieve workflow optimization affect everybody within the hospital workspace โ€“ including patients. Unhappy employees and dissatisfied patients will negate efforts at improving hospital workflows, and ultimately have a negative impact on ROI.

The healthcare sector is highly regulated and the procedures for strategizing an improvement in hospital workflows must consider all necessary regulations and laws. For example: sending electronic Protected Healthcare Information (ePHI) must be completed in a way that is compliant with many sets of regulations (HIPAA, HITECH, etc.). A solution is in place for sending ePHI that has been proven to enhance hospital workflows, increase productivity and help to deliver a higher standard of patient care โ€“ secure messaging.

This solution keeps all data safe and secure and ensures compliance with the HIPAA Rules. It is the perfect service to replace insecure and outdated channels of communication, including voicemail, email, pagers and fax machines. These are ways of communicating that, typically, inhibit critical workflows and often lead to medical professionals playing phone tag chasing up responses in order to complete hospital admissions, request physician consults, view lab results, communicate with care teams and arrange patient discharges.

All of these processes involve a specific workflow, but outmoded channels of communication more often than not stop them from flowing as smoothly as they could. Due to this, there is time wastage, low staff morale and delays to treatment. However, using secure messaging, it is possible to streamline hospital workflows โ€“ cutting resource drains and permitting medics to spend more time treating their patients.

Using secure messaging will not alter the way in which these processes are conducted, just streamline hospital workflow management. It will allow your medical staff to move through their day and complete tasks more efficiently and spend more face to face time with patients as less time will need to be spent on admin tasks.

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Other benefits of secure messaging include:

  • Fewer risks: HIPAA compliance is assured, and Meaningful Use incentive program payments will be easier to apply for.
  • Quicker, more effective communication: This means that you can treat more patients, more swiftly, and improve clinical outcomes.
  • Use of personal mobile devices: Personal devices can be used for collaborating with other medical professionals, eliminating the cost of having to supply mobile devices to the workforce.

This method of communication can bring benefits to many different clinical workflows, such as improving emergency room operational efficiency, accelerating hospital admissions, streamlining testing processes, enhancing hospital pharmacy tasks, and speeding up hospital discharges.

Secure messaging will allow you to cut costs while improving staff morale and patient satisfaction. To find out more about implementing a secure messaging solution at your healthcare organization, speak with a HIPAA-compliant secure messaging provider for advice on the best implementation to meet your organization’s needs.