While the headlines debate the politics of providing cost-efficient healthcare to all our citizens, the “rubber meets the road” when the patient is at the point of care in any healthcare institution or hospital. This is where the patient, patient information, and a variety of healthcare professionals must all interact effectively and communicate efficiently to provide time-sensitive healthcare to a patient.
While patient information technology has been bridging the gap of distance by moving to computerized storage and retrieval, providing timely and efficient contacts with a variety of different healthcare professionals is now starting to improve as well. This is now being made possible through the integration of all forms of communications, better known as “unified communications” (or UC) and is particularly important when the different staff members are very mobile. NEC, a global, enterprise communications provider, is addressing the practical need to provide more flexible communication solutions for different job responsibilities in a clinical healthcare environment, which they describe as “Role-enabled Communications.”
Mobility is a key factor for both timely information delivery and efficient procedural coordination. Studies have shown that physicians and nurses walk several miles per day in delivering patient services, and such time often competes with individual accessibility for time-critical, real-time communications. Improving healthcare delivery productivity is therefore very dependent on selectively improving individual communications efficiency through a variety of new UC-enabled solutions.
What UC Will Do For Clinical Healthcare Communications
Three of the biggest changes that unified communications (UC) is enabling in order to make traditional premise-based communications more efficient are:
- Personalized flexibility and efficiency for communicating with people and exchanging information, based on different individual end-user responsibilities, accessibility, and time availability.
- Enabling automated application processes to proactively initiate contacts with specific or available personnel to deliver time-sensitive notifications and interact with them in real time.
- Exploitation of device independent Mobile UC, as well as device consolidation, to increase both contact accessibility and associated personal availability with minimum cost. Mobile devices are becoming more multi-modal and software-based, enabling end users to do more while away from desktop computers.
These three communication developments alone will account for much of the long sought-after improvements in operational performance and performance productivity that the concept of UC has been touted for. The fact that there will also be savings in operational and equipment costs because of the replacement of TDM networking with IP networks won’t hurt either, but the bottom line in clinical healthcare is usually improving healthcare delivery performance at the point of service.
In few other “vertical” industries are the benefits and the stakes so high as in healthcare. For a detailed review of the many specific ways that UC can benefit “Role-enabled Communication” requirements, read the recent white paper published by NEC.
Unlike traditional telephone systems which, except for traditional call center personnel, treated all users equally, telephony is now becoming an integrated application of UC, (“UC Telephony”), rather than the traditional separate communication “silo” of the past. That means that telephony will selectively and seamlessly be exploited when and where appropriate, along with all the other UC communication applications such as “click-to-call,” intelligent call routing, instant conferencing, Presence management, mobile access, unified messaging, and Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). This also means that migrating from traditional telephony to UC will require integrating and customizing telephony functions to support all “Role-based” UC needs of individual healthcare staff and patients, including automated self-service applications.
“Roles” Determine Specific UC Needs
Healthcare delivery is a specialized “vertical” industry, but within the vertical there are different job “roles” that need to be supported with effective unified communications solutions. These solutions may vary by business model – hospital versus clinic – and may vary in complexity – single vendor versus an integrated multi-vendor solution.
For instance, in a complex hospital setting, mobile UC infrastructure and applications from a variety of vendors are integral to the automation of common operational processes. Note NEC’s case study on St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, NY. This is an NEC customer leveraging a combination of NEC IP voice, NEC wireless site survey and implementation of Cisco wireless infrastructure, and, finally, AeroScout’s RFID temperature monitoring solutions, in order to exceed Joint Commission compliance standards on storage temperature requirements for drugs, blood and tissues. This combination ultimately enhances patient safety and allows nursing staff to efficiently focus their efforts in providing personalized healthcare to patients.
In another example, a multi-location dental practice needs to improve patient customer service through consistent mobile communications across its clinic locations. Childrens' Dental Health Associates (view the case study) leverages NEC’s UNIVERGE SV8100 communications server with Automatic Call Distribution, allowing front-office employees to more effectively communicate with parents. Meanwhile, the dentists are able to move from one practice location to another using the same MH 240 handset and extension number.
In addition to these specialized job responsibilities, we must never forget the roles that non-employees play in operational communications in a clinical healthcare facility. These can include attending physicians and specialists in a hospital, ambulance and other emergency services, all of whom need to be supported by a UC environment for efficient clinical work flow. It might also include the “patients” as consumers increasingly adopt mobile communications; automated interactions and reminder notifications to them can change and improve clinical procedures involving them as well.
As you can see, UC needs are not just voice telephony needs, but include all elements of the three big changes mentioned at the beginning, i.e., all forms of communications by contact initiators and recipients/respondents, interactive contacts with automated applications, and mobile accessibility.
However, individual end users may require the flexibility of UC simply because of their situational circumstances, especially when they are mobile. For this reason, mobile personnel with high-value job “roles,” will be leading candidates for using UC facilities, while other, desk-bound users, won’t benefit as much.
UC Implementation Implications
Aside from the benefits that individual “role-based” end users and high-value clinical healthcare processes will gain from implementing various UC applications such as mobile interface flexibility or presence-based contacts, it will be necessary to use the proposed UC implementation details to also plan for infrastructure technology changes, including new integrations with endpoint devices, communications enabled clinical business applications (CEBP), and IP network changes to support the new kinds of converged traffic that will evolve.
Inasmuch as UC is a relatively new kind of environment, there will be little experience available to tell you exactly what to do. This is one reason that most telephony technology providers have started offering Professional Services and Hosted Service offerings to assist their customers to move from their legacy operational environment to the benefits of a UC environment. Aside from requiring telephony expertise to protect exiting telephony investments that still work, a key requirement for the future will be the experience with “vertical market” applications and integrations of telephony functions with business process applications. While SIP-based integrations will open new doors exploiting UC flexibility, there is still a requirement for solid experience with both old and new forms of telephony integrations.
Summary
Business benefits from UC will vary from organization to organization, even if within the same vertical industry. Furthermore, the benefits will vary from one business process to another, as well as from one individual user to another. The guidelines discussed here are an approach to start the UC migration journey from the “top down,” with the assistance of recognized expertise in both legacy telephony and new “UC Telephony” as it applies to your particular healthcare delivery organization and its current operations. With migration to UC, you will have to learn as you go to slowly but surely supplement end-of-life communication technologies, integrate operational process applications, and change the latter accordingly.