The Future of Clinical Communication: Platforms that Improve Care and Collaboration

“Great communication begins with connection” – Oprah Winfrey.

Communication in the workplace is the key driver of all operations. Especially in the clinical industry, communication between doctors, caregivers, and other staff strongly impacts the quality of care delivered to the patients.

For this reason, it is important to consider implementing clinical communication platforms that facilitate seamless connectivity and automation, which will help clinical staff stay on top of things.

Let’s explore what clinical communication platforms are, their benefits, and the leading five platforms you can implement at your clinic to become future-ready.

Understanding Clinical Communication

Clinical communication is a structured process that facilitates the exchange of information between healthcare providers, patients, doctors, and caregivers. It includes sharing medical details, discussing diagnoses, treatments, and prognoses, and building rapport in the ecosystem.

Clinical communication aims to establish and deliver efficient systems for patient care. It includes all forms of communication necessary to deliver the best possible care to patients.

A well-oiled system for clinical communication helps facilitate:

• Patient involvement in the decision-making process.
• Interprofessional collaboration.
• Establish active listening at clinics.

Communication is the foundation to improve the quality and efficacy of care delivered at a clinic.

Trivia: According to Project’s report, 31% of people say they use email to communicate in the workplace, followed by 30% who say they use an online chat platform (like Slack). So there is good demand for a dedicated communications solution in organizations.

What are Clinical Communication Platforms?

Clinical communication and collaboration platforms (CC&C) are applications that run on desktops or mobile devices that facilitate secure messaging and integration of clinical systems to enhance clinical communication workflows.

Ever since the notification of HIPAA, a compliant way of clinical messaging was required, which gave rise to the adoption of CC&C platforms. This platform basically extracts or pulls data from the electronic medical records stored on the database to allow clinicians quick access to relevant patient information right on their mobile devices.

CC&C platforms also facilitate information about on-call clinicians, their availability, response times, etc., to plan better care for patients.

What Does a Clinical Communication Platform Do?

Did you know that the market for clinical communication platforms is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 17.5% to reach a value of $9.35 billion by 2031?

A clinical communication platform performs several important tasks:

• Facilitate clinical messaging over secure systems that are compliant with HIPAA.
• Facilitate group chats and channels that various departments can customize according to their teams and needs.
• Set up dedicated channels for interdisciplinary collaboration between professionals of different specialties.
• Make it easier to set up video conferencing, telemedicine, and telehealth.
• Simplifying the sharing of patients’ medical records with concerned professionals across the care ecosystem.

These are just the major roles that clinical communication platforms play. Depending on the software you get, there may be more features on CC&C platforms.

How can the Clinical Communication Platform Enhance Care?

Technology and innovation have made it possible to incorporate countless features in clinical communication platforms. All these features enhance internal workflows and communication, ultimately enhancing the level and quality of care that patients receive:

1. Efficient Communication

A Joint Commission study, although done in 2018, showed that 80% of serious medical errors were a result of miscommunication.

Clinical communication platforms have the capability to overhaul the way medical professionals interact at work completely. They help reduce reliance on outdated technology like pagers, fax, etc. and allow the integration of more widely accessible tech for communication (like mobile phones).

They provide secure messaging channels where medical practitioners can freely discuss cases without the risk of regulatory breach. It enhances the quality of care delivered to patients.

2. Inter-departmental Collaboration

For complex healthcare cases where patients require a multidisciplinary approach, seamless communication and collaboration are key to delivering impactful care. Clinical communication platforms facilitate real-time group communication, file exchange, information sharing, and instant messaging capabilities to make interdisciplinary collaboration possible.

Clinical communication platforms unify all communications on a single interface, helping healthcare providers stay on the same page for all connected cases.

It allows a patient to receive holistic care without having to run from one department to the next.

3. Improved Patient Privacy

Patient data protection and privacy are a major concern today when healthcare has become digital and remote consultation is popular.

Clinical communication platforms are HIPAA compliant and ensure that all exchanges that occur over these platforms are secure and protected. They provide robust data governance measures to control who has access to patient information and have built-in safety measures to prevent data breaches in the event a device is stolen.

Clinical communication platforms offer data encryption, access control, and secure messaging.

4. Better Outcomes

Technologies implemented in healthcare have but one aim: to help patients become healthy again and lead long and happy lives. Clinical communication platforms help enhance the connectivity between healthcare teams and collaboration capabilities, which reduces caregiving delays. They also help reduce medical errors that could lead to more complications in a case.

These communication platforms facilitate timely intervention to enhance patient outcomes and treatment safety. They enable patient monitoring and timely intimation through secured group messaging. All of this works to enhance patient outcomes.

5. Reduced Response Times

Clinics are sometimes required to manage patient emergencies. In such situations, every second counts. Using clinical communication platforms helps alert all the concerned healthcare providers of the emergency and get them at the scene at the earliest.

These platforms especially help with homecare setups where dedicated nurses attend to patients at their home. The nurses can quickly leverage the secured messaging and alert systems to notify the clinic about emergencies and reduce the response time of care delivery.

6. Eased Workload on IT

The IT setups are already quite complex in a healthcare environment. Clinical communication platforms are designed to take up little real estate on the IT landscape and integrate easily with existing systems. They help connect various platforms together (like EMR and messaging) without being too heavy on the existing IT setups.

5 Leading Clinical Communication Platforms to Stay Future-Ready

Let’s take a look at five future-ready clinical communication tools you can employ today to enhance workplace communication for your healthcare services:

1. RXNT

G2 Rating: 4.2/5

This software is a cloud-based, integrated patient healthcare solution that offers much more than simple clinical communication features. You can use it to manage your clinic, staff, and practice as well.

Key Features

• EHR: Clinical data sharing, electronic referrals, mobile connectivity, streamlined record management, and mobile applications to facilitate easy workplace communication.
• Electronic prescription: Transmit prescriptions securely, manage errors and interactions pertaining to errors, allergies, etc. and direct access to Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) of every state.
• Practice management: Customizable patient scheduling, advanced reporting, medical billing, and revenue cycle management.

2. PerfectServe

G2 Rating: 3.5/5

PerfectServe is a dedicated clinical communication platform that accelerates the speed of care. It can optimize your clinical collaboration and improve patient and family communication.

Key Features

• Provider collaboration: Disruption-free collaboration, text, call, video channels to reach physicians, instant notification of critical results, etc.
• Nurse tool belt: Respond to nurse call alerts from anywhere, categorize alarms for better differentiation, and reduce overhead paging.
• Integrated communication: HIPAA compliant and certified for SOC 2, reduced cost of ownership, and easy integration with EHRs.
• Operations: Task automation, consolidation of clinical systems, scheduling, nurse calls, and operator consoles.

3. Change Healthcare

G2 Rating: 3.7/5

Now rebranded as Optum, Change Healthcare is a one-stop destination for all things healthcare. You can use this platform for consulting services, data and analytics, financial solutions, and much more.

Key Features

• Healthcare access: Integrated eligibility services, state-based exchanges, maintenance and operations services, etc.
• Health benefits solutions: Complex care management to reduce the cost of care, wellness programs to connect employees and members for relevant treatment, etc.
• Operations and technology: Clinical decision support, connect clinical and financial aspects of healthcare for optimum results, enterprise imaging, enhanced enterprise connectivity, pharmacy technology solutions, and more.

4. Relatient

G2 Rating: 4.8/5

Relatient is a combination of scheduling and communication tools that enhances access to healthcare. It can improve patient engagement and establish a seamless continuum of care.

Key Features

• Scheduling: Appointment confirmation, multichannel messaging, appointment reminders, contact center scheduling, etc.
• Chat: Real-time HIPAA-compliant chat platform, audit trails, search filters, departmental routing, EHR chat integration, inbound messaging, etc.
• Engagement: Dynamic patient communication software, appointment reminders, broadcast messaging, configurable messages, health campaigns, etc.
• Intake: Digital registration, digital consent capture, mobile-friendly processes, eRegistration, insurance and ID collection, HIPAA-compliant data collection, etc.

5. theEMPLOYEEapp

G2 Rating: 4.2/5

theEMPLOYEEapp is a mobile-based internal communication platform that simplifies connectivity. You can use it to inform, engage, and connect with your employees.

Key Features

• Employee mobile app: news feed content, searchable content, notifications, iOS/Android native apps.
• Intranet experience: Access from any device with web, quick links, searchable content, calendars, and events.
• Texting system: Unlimited texts for employees, reduction in email overload, tasks and reminders, enhanced content open rates.
• Microlearning videos: Better knowledge retention and engagement, targeted courses for cohorts, success measurement, employee engagement, etc.
• Content Management system: Post scheduling, language localization, permission management, etc.
• Metrics and analytics: Employee engagement measurement, measuring the reach of broadcasts, etc.
• Security and compliance: SOC Type 2 compliant, Cyber essentials certified, Veracode audit perfect score, etc.

Future Trends in Clinical Communication Platforms

In one KLAS study, it was discovered that 100% of the respondents agreed that clinical communication platforms enhanced their overall efficiency. Additionally, 94% agreed that these platforms improved clinician collaboration.

The impact that clinical communication platforms have on healthcare is clear and positive. The future trends in the industry focus on several factors, such as:

• Patient care and safety: The growing need for enhanced patient safety and reduced response times calls for efficient workplace communication in healthcare. The trends focus on developing communication tools that facilitate quicker decision-making and remove siloes in information exchanges.
• Technology integration: With continuous innovation and advancement in technology, integration of new solutions with existing systems requires fine-tuning and refinement. The newer versions of clinical communication apps, therefore, focus more on integrability to facilitate implementation.
• Growth and adoption: Clinical communication tools are not yet widely popular. By leveraging technology, we need to raise awareness about the importance of accurate and prompt communication in healthcare. The regulatory frameworks need to take such technological solutions into account and help them proliferate the market easily.
• Mobile-based applications: The key trend in designing clinical communication tools is making it mobile friendly. Mobile-based applications are highly accessible and people readily download and use them to improve convenience and speed of tasking.

Trivia: According to a Haiilo report, 71.8% of respondents agree that internal communication is a critical strategy for change management in an organization.

Enhance Workplace Communication with Seamless Connectivity

In the field of healthcare, effective and immediate communication can make a big difference to the quality of care delivered to those in need. Clinical communication platforms help create a positive, healing impact on your patients, and empower your healthcare teams to function at their best.

These tools remove data siloes, establish connectivity across clinical departments, bring all patient information on a single interface, and facilitate prompt exchange of information. It all works in tandem to enhance the care you are able to deliver to the patients.

To explore more benefits and features of using workplace or clinical communication platforms, visit the EMPLOYEE app website today.

FAQs

1. What features should a clinical communication platform have?

Look for features like secure messaging, inter-departmental collaboration features, support for telehealth, and access governance features.

2. How can I enhance security on a clinical communication platform?

You can consider setting strong password policies, ensuring that the app is HIPAA and SOC2-compliant, using modernized encryptions, and conducting regular audits.

3. What is the cost of implementing and using these apps?

You can expect an initial purchase cost, an implementation cost that would go towards technical support for configuring the app, and a long-term maintenance and upgrade cost.

4. What factors can help me measure the success of a clinical communication app?

You can measure improvement in collaboration, communication, workplace efficiency, patient outcomes, and care response times to evaluate an app.