Caregiver Collaboration

Caregiver Collaboration

High-quality healthcare is delivered with effective and timely communication between care partners and patients in an integrated information environment.

In healthcare settings, working with teams can sometimes lead to fragmented communication, information, and work processes that put services at risk. The result may be the duplication of patient records, unnecessary tests, or prolonged hospital stays - all of which increase medical costs and decrease patient satisfaction.

Effective and timely communication and collaboration among members of a care team is of vital importance to the quality of patient care. Care team members need an integrated communication and information environment in which they can quickly, easily, and securely access up-to-date patient information - and each other - from a variety of locations using tools that are familiar, economical, and easy to use.

"Our new voice response contact system, built with Office Communications Server 2007, integrates easily with our patient management and scheduling procedures. With it, we've lowered our cost per contact and more than doubled the number of low-income patients scheduling first-time preventive care visits."
Jorge Weingarten, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Care1st Health Plan

Unified communications technologies from Microsoft

Caregiver collaboration solutions from Microsoft include unified communications technologies that bring the many ways healthcare professionals communicate into one familiar user interface that lets them initiate and manage email, messaging, phone calls, web conferencing, calendar items, and audio or video conferences with a click of the mouse or a simple voice command. This user interface also shows whether the people they want to reach are available and the best ways to reach them, alleviating many of the communication bottlenecks healthcare professionals so often experience. This means they can spend less time playing phone tag and more time caring for patients.

Designed to meet the workflow needs of mobile and geographically-distributed care teams, Microsoft unified communications technologies provide caregivers with access to patient information and each other on a variety of systems and devices, such as PCs, mobile phones, and Tablet PCs.

Care team collaboration

Caregivers can collaborate more effectively by being able to communicate with each other across geographic and infrastructure boundaries - when, where, and how it's most convenient. Color-coded dots called presence icons indicate availability and make mobile team members available to each other on a "click-to-communicate" basis. And care teams can share test results, X-rays, and patient images using web, audio, and video conferencing with Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

Results:

  • Improved quality of care and patient safety.
  • Higher caregiver and patient satisfaction.
  • More efficient and effective communications resulting in reduced travel time and costs for outreach activities and consultations.

Medical training and education

Using unified communications technologies from Microsoft, caregivers can find colleagues quickly by department or role and contact them using the presence information integrated within clinical and administrative portals. Faster communication and resolution of issues are possible when caregivers can click-to-communicate from within the clinical portals or administrative dashboards they're already using.

Communications are captured and documented for regulatory compliance and auditing purposes when they are initiated using the presence and click-to-communicate functions embedded into health and administrative portals. And users have access to their email, calendars, and other mail data directly from the health portal.

Results:

  • Streamlined communication and increased caregiver efficiency.

  • Interoperability with different portal platforms.

  • Improved regulatory and privacy compliance.

Outpatient scheduling and follow-up

Healthcare teams can schedule appointments, plan follow-ups, and set up alerts quickly and easily using Exchange Server and the Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) capabilities of Office Communications Server. In addition, patients can follow post-treatment care regimes, communicate with care teams, and schedule and keep appointments using an online portal.

Results:

  • Improved post-treatment care and reduced acute-care costs.
  • Long-term patient satisfaction and retention.
  • Increased revenue channels and referrals to other patients.

Caregiver-to-patient communication

Using Office Live Meeting, patients and caregivers can communicate more efficiently before, after, and between office visits. This may include remote delivery of patient education, post-treatment counseling, and virtual group sessions, which are simplified with the conferencing options in Office Live Meeting.

This technology can also be used to help patients prepare for surgery or review care plans which improves decisions about care management because it's based on real-time communication between providers, care teams, and patients.

And, because security and compliance are critical to healthcare organizations, Exchange Server uses encryption to help secure and track information exchanged between doctors, family members, the care team, and government agencies according to the latest regulations.

Results:

  • Enhanced care management decisions.
  • Improved regulatory compliance and risk management.
  • Greater patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes at a lower cost.