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Many areas in hospitals and long-term care facilities feel the impact of inefficient communication, but probably none more pervasive than at the bedside. The lack of streamlined workflows for capturing, communicating and fulfilling patients' needs has a very real impact on aspects of patient safety and satisfaction as well as the bottom line of the facility. Fortunately, new technologies are emerging that enable effective and efficient communication of such requests.
100 Years of Evolution
Florence Nightingale invented the call bell system over 100 years ago. Since then, the evolution of bedside communication has marched on. In recent years, nurse call systems have progressed to include many aspects of communication beyond simple notifications.
 State-of-the-art bedside communication technologies include the ability to present patients with custom-tailored request sets, automatically identify and inform the right care providers for many different types of issues, provide meaningful feedback to patients and tracking the entire lifecycle of every patient request. Surprisingly, these advanced systems are actually less expensive to deploy than their predecessors.
Understanding Patient Needs
Bedside devices that are able to present patients with an array of potential requests-instead of the traditional single button for all needs - certainly stand to make patients more comfortable in any inpatient setting. That said, the benefits to care providers are potentially much greater.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time in a hospital has seen this scenario play out:
- A call light goes off.
- A nurse rushes to the patient's bedside.
- The nurse arrives at the patient's bedside and identifies the nature of the request.
- The nurse walks away to track down an article such as a bed sheet or glass of water.
- The nurse, or an assistant, returns to the patient bedside to fulfill the request.
Imagine the impact of a system that can identify the exact nature of the patient request before a nurse walks into the room. The efficiency gained by deploying such a system is profound, even before considering more complex scenarios like patients who speak little to no English or the reality that some requests are actually urgent while others are not.
Capturing the specific nature of patient needs is a basic building block to resolving inefficient communication at the bedside. Systems present patients with a multi-lingual touchscreen interface with customized sets of requests for patients in many different scenarios.
Finding the Right Person for the Job
Once you've got a system in place that can determine the actual nature of patients' needs, there are opportunities to improve the resolution of those requests. One of the easiest ways to make an immediate impact on efficiency is to route requests directly to the individuals that will eventually fulfill them.
Intelligent delegation of patient requests has a double impact; it removes important but time-consuming steps from the patient care process and enables highly trained individuals like nurses to focus on the tasks that they are best suited to perform. Think back to the scenario outlined earlier. In any normal hospital, it plays out multiple times concurrently, with some requests obviously being more urgent than others.
Most modern nurse call technologies either have a dedicated mobile interface or support integrations into existing workflow management solutions. The ability to communicate directly and automatically with care providers is a critical link to driving efficient communication.
Letting Patients Know You Care
A recurring theme in articles written about hospitals and long-term care facilities is the perceived (or real) lack of responsiveness to patient needs. There have been a number of stories in the news recently about patients going to extremes such as dialing 911 or attempting to get out of bed to find a care provider to make sure their requests are being resolved.
Beyond the obvious patient safety issues, incidents like this are indicative of existing workflow problems and a cause of further inefficiencies. Disruptive behavior by patients due to the perception of unresponsive staff costs facilities in terms of both added work and decreased satisfaction across the board.
Fortunately, emerging technologies at the bedside give care providers a platform to acknowledge patient requests and set realistic expectations about the speed of care, even in foreign languages.
Process Optimization
Developing a more efficient process for bedside communication starts with understanding current performance gaps. Newer systems for bedside communication create a transactional record for every event so that the entire landscape of requests and resolutions is visible to the administration for process optimization.
For example, consider the following situation: In one area of a certain hospital requests for glasses of water routinely take more than five minutes to close, while in another area of the hospital they are resolved in under five minutes. Having visibility into the lifecycle of each request affords the opportunity to create and apply best practices. In the example listed above, here are two workflows that lead to very different outcomes:
Hospital Wing A
Patient requests water
Request is delivered to nurse manager
Nurse manager delegates request to nurse
Nurse delegates request to nurse assistant
Nurse assistant notifies patient that help is on the way
Nurse assistant brings water to patient
Total time: 7 minutes
Total Steps: 6
Hospital Wing B
Patient requests water
Request is delivered to nurse assistant
Nurse assistant notifies patient that help is on the way
Nurse assistant brings water to patient
Total time: 2 minutes
Total Steps: 4
Systems provide a web interface to show detailed information to administrators like the scenario above. It may not always be as easy as this example to see opportunities for improvement, but reporting against a robust set of data can certainly provide visibility into potential efficiency issues.
Cost Savings
One of the easiest places to see the impact of bedside efficiency initiatives is the cost of implementation. Most hospitals and long-term care facilities have already gone down the road of installing hard-wired nurse call systems. For those that haven't though, there is a real opportunity to more efficiently deploy such technologies.
Many older systems, such as the traditional call bell, require wires to be physically placed throughout the facility. This is a cost that can be avoided by leveraging modern wireless technology. Additional cost savings can be generated by using off-the-shelf technology instead of complex proprietary systems.
Brian Yarnell is the VP & general manager of Starling, a division of LanguageMate that creates bedside communication technology. He has been involved in the creation of technology platforms for more than 10 years, creating innovative systems in Healthcare, Digital Media, Manufacturing and Business Intelligence.
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