How to Improve Healthcare Teamwork with Collaboration Tools

The Evolution of Healthcare’s Collaboration Approach: An Overview

Over the past five years, critical gaps in communication and collaboration have become increasingly apparent in healthcare. With the focus on virtual care during the pandemic, there seemed to be a bit of inertia among many healthcare organizations when it came to improving clinical communication.

But now, health systems are returning to these projects amid staffing concerns. The intense pressures of the ongoing labor shortage have exacerbated clinician burnout, highlighting the urgent need for efficient, user-friendly communication platforms. As a result, clinical communication platforms have become more deeply integrated and embedded in clinical workflows.

Externally, the pandemic also revealed how ill-prepared some healthcare organizations were for receiving and directing the great volume of calls and other forms of communications from the communities they served. The legacy systems that they relied on in the past were not suited to meet the influx of questions concerning testing, vaccine availability and more.

These issues led a number of organizations to turn their attention to cloud-based platforms as a contact center solution. From a scalability perspective, it made sense to move to the cloud. It allows organizations to lower costs, improve cyber resilience, provide better access and ease management. Now, more healthcare organizations are open to moving their contact center and customer engagement solutions to the cloud with the aim of improving the patient experience.

Today’s patients are used to self-service applications in other areas of their life, so they expect such options in healthcare. They want to schedule appointments quickly, receive pharmacy refills and pay bills online, among other things. And the more that providers can personalize the care experience, the better.

Healthcare organizations that deploy tech solutions to help patients handle these aspects themselves can then free up the staff members assigned to these tasks to focus on mission-critical projects instead. Reallocating budget from contact center agents answering calls for tasks that can be automated into more crucial clinical activities is something that a lot of health systems are exploring.

Expectations for Collaboration Solutions in Healthcare

As healthcare organizations transform their approaches to collaboration, they will gravitate toward solutions that can consolidate fragmented communication platforms and devices. The goal is to have “one device to rule them all.” The ability to unify on one device is powerful.

Secure messaging, chat and role-based calling have become essential features in healthcare collaboration platforms. The true value of these platforms lies in their ability to fully integrate with telephony, electronic health record systems and other supporting clinical systems. With contact center staff often working remotely, organizations want solutions that will foster uninterrupted collaboration within and outside hospital walls.

Integration between healthcare platforms is essential because it eliminates data silos, ensuring that all patient information is accessible in one place. Additionally, integrated collaboration platforms streamline clinical workflows, reducing administrative burdens and helping to alleviate clinician burnout.

Organizations need continuous data transmission between systems. As soon as users must navigate multiple systems, they lose context, which means that a patient might need to repeat information that should have been shared from the start of the interaction, for example. That can be a deal-breaker and may push a patient away from returning to that health system.  

Data, especially in healthcare, is located in a vast number of places, so integrating siloed pieces of data to provide a comprehensive journey for the patient as they move through whatever digital channel they’re interacting with is critical. Health systems need to provide consistency of digital communications along a continuum of care, from registration all the way to discharge, with follow-up reminders.

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Ongoing Challenges and Hopes for the Future of Collaboration

There are many challenges that can stall a collaboration project, such as lack of vision and strategy, interoperability, data, privacy, security, and inadequate user buy-in and adoption. For a modern collaboration strategy to work, the clinical team must be involved.

Many of these conversations start in IT, and that’s the wrong way to do it. It needs to come from clinical down. When IT begins searching for solutions, many aspects can be missed. For these solutions to work, clinical buy-in is key, and it should start with a chief nursing officer or a chief medical informatics officer. Without clinical buy-in, these projects won’t get off the ground.

Organizations should also connect the value of the project to outcomes they are trying to drive. This project should not be a technical implementation or exercise; it’s actually a transformative strategy to reduce clinician burnout and improve patient experience, for instance. Tie it to something tangible that the organization can get its arms around.

As the industry looks to the future of collaboration, artificial intelligence will continue to be a sought-after feature. AI is poised to streamline communication workflows, ensuring that critical information is delivered promptly and accurately to the right team members. Additionally, AI features will intelligently filter and prioritize alerts, reducing alarm fatigue for providers. Real-time decision support tools will analyze patient data on the fly, providing clinicians with actionable insights to improve patient outcomes.

And there will be more augmentation of human capabilities. AI will help improve the humanization of the contact center, and agents will become care navigators. They will add more value to the care continuum as representatives who can help patients in their first steps through a healthcare organization.

This article is part of HealthTech’s MonITor blog series.