Unified Communications Solutions Improve Healthcare Workflows

During a healthcare emergency, every second counts. Whether the emergency happens at a patient’s home or a healthcare facility, effective care is everyone’s concern — patients, nurses, and doctors. In all situations, instant access to critical information is the key to delivering effective, quality healthcare. Every second spent trying to find the correct data is wasted for everyone involved: nurses who must assess situations, doctors who must diagnose, and patients who need to know about the treatment they will receive.

Ultimately, the efficient, real-time delivery of critical information is enabled by communications solutions that are ready, available, and reliable. Outdated communications systems and complex medical technology infrastructure lead to inefficient interactions between medical teams and patients, causing delays and frustrations. However, with an effective communication solution, healthcare workflows can be streamlined and integrated so that critical information is collected from multiple sources, analyzed, and securely always distributed to the right people, wherever they are.

For many healthcare providers, unified communications (UC) solutions enabling the flow of critical information from patients to nurses, nurses to doctors, and from healthcare professionals back to patients are the keys to delivering quality care in any emergency.

Emergency Situations need Efficient Communications

Consider the vital role efficient access to critical information plays during a cardiac emergency when changes in a patient’s condition can be immediate and real-time communication can save seconds that save lives.

From the patient’s perspective, a cardiac emergency is debilitating and scary. The sudden sharp chest pain, shortness of breath, and light-headedness create confusion and fear. The patient expects a call to emergency services will be met with a paramedic team's immediate and efficient response. In this critical moment, the patient’s only concern is that help arrives quickly and that the process needed to get that help works efficiently on the other end of the call.

The information that emergency services personnel need to respond efficiently must be immediately accessible to all who need it. Communications technology should combine data from multiple public and emergency services databases to enable call takers to make informed assessments, locate and dispatch the nearest ambulance, and provide response personnel with the information they need on-site.

Reliable Access to Real-time Information is Critical

From an emergency room nurse’s perspective, a cardiac emergency is another example of many critical situations that must be managed on a demanding day. To deliver the right level of care, access to necessary information is needed while the patient is in transit, which includes information about the patient’s condition, estimated arrival time, and the emergency room where the patient will be admitted.

When the ambulance arrives, the nursing team must act quickly to stabilize the patient, perform the needed blood tests, connect the patient to an EKG, and collect all the data the cardiologist will need to diagnose and determine the next course of action. All this must be done while in motion from the Emergency Medical Services Coordination Center to the triage area and the consultation room.

Access to real-time communication and information is needed to make this process efficient. Gone are the days of paper-based workflows managed from a central station. Today’s emergency room teams need UC solutions that deliver information directly to mobile devices anywhere in the emergency area. Those devices must integrate and work seamlessly with the alarm server and nursing call systems to keep everyone on the team connected and always informed.

Multi-channel Communications Improves Post-Emergency Care

From a cardiologist’s perspective, a digital connection is vital before, during, and after the emergency.

With UC systems, assessment and diagnosis can begin long before arriving at the patient’s bedside. Emergency notifications and regular updates from the nursing team over desktop and mobile devices can confirm patient status, deliver test results, and provide real-time updates that make it easier to determine the best course of action and act quickly if the patient needs immediate surgery.

Post-emergency, after the patient has been discharged, UC solutions can make real-time remote monitoring and care more efficient for the doctor and the patient. With a full-featured UC solution, the doctor can easily communicate with the patient and provide a medical consultation anytime. Most importantly, the patient can connect with the doctor to share critical information from home.

Mitel Enables More Efficient Healthcare Processes

Of course, the UC solutions that make this seamless sharing of real-time information possible for everyone involved must work seamlessly from the user’s perspective.

For many healthcare facilities worldwide, the UC solutions that reduce the back-end workload on staff while emphasizing patient-centric approaches to communications are delivered by Mitel. These organizations trust Mitel to provide the communications solutions they need to improve patient care by enabling more efficient healthcare processes.

Mitel enables cost-effective, real-time, and secure interactions for the entire healthcare workflow — from emergency services to after-incident care — with:

• Contact center solutions, such as MiContact Center with Ignite agent workspace.
• 700 DECT handsets integrated with emergency room systems.
• IP phones for reliable desktop communications.
• AI integrations, such as chatbots for MiContact Center.
• Remote meeting solutions with seamless third-party integrations for desktop and mobile.
• Omnichannel support for communications with patients.
• AI-supported contact center automation for patient self-service appointment bookings and reminders.

Learn more about Mitel UC solutions for healthcare.