Hospitals are busy noisy places with alarms clanging, pagers blaring overhead, doors opening and closing, TVs droning on, and people talking in loud voices. Under ACA, patient satisfaction has become even more important as low patient satisfaction or “Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores can directly impact the financial operations of a healthcare organization as well as its reputation in the community.
Just recently, Practice Unite www.practiceunite.com, a mobile health solutions company and Futura Mobility www.futuremobility.ca, providing specialized IT services, along with their implementation arm Pursuit Health Advisors www.pursuithealthcare.com are concentrating on reducing noise in hospitals.
Recently, Inspira Health Network (IHN) www.inspirahealthnetwork.org unveiled the results of their Quiet Hospital initiative and demonstrated a 26 percent increase in its HCAHPS scores for hospital quietness at IHN’s Vineland hospital www.inspirahealthnetwork.org/vineland.
IHN consisting of three medical centers and more than 60 locations in New Jersey saw an opportunity to improve scores measuring noise in their hospitals which was affected in part by a high volume of overhead pages.
The deployed solution was to cut overhead pages from 150 a day to only 3 overnight. As a result, patient satisfaction scores for quietness increased by 26 percent as compared to the prior twelve months. This solution was subsequently deployed at other locations and resulted in initial scores trending upwards.
As reported by Tom Pacek, CIO, for IHN, “It was clear that we needed to reduce the number of overhead pages in our three main facilities. The problem was that our nurses had become dependent on this system to reach physicians. We worked with the IT team to design a solution to the problem.”
The Practice Unite solution makes it easy for nurses to reach physicians. They now send a secure text from their desktop to a secure mobile app on the physician’s phone. The physicians call the nurses back directly by clicking on the message which routes automatically to the nurses at their assigned extensions. These extensions can change on a daily basis so the Practice Unite app makes it simple for the nurse to change the extensions daily.
According to Adam Turinas, CEO, Practice Unite, “This initiative is part of a long term roadmap to help improve a wide range of workflow challenges that will help Inspira transition to the new model of value-based care.