More than two years after replacing most of Beaufort Memorial Hospital's pagers with a secure texting app, vice president and CIO Ed Ricks says he's learned a few things about bringing mHealth into the hospital.
"This wasn't a technology solution set," Ricks told mHealth News. "Everybody's here to take care of patients," and they're willing to adopt new solutions if they improve the process and don't make life harder.
In other words, stop trying to sell clinicians on all the neat little gadgets and tools, and focus on how those devices and solutions will make things better. That's what doctors and nurses want to see and hear.
Three years ago, Ricks said he noticed a problem with clinicians texting – namely, they were using their own smartphones and devices to send messages to each other. That, to put it mildly, was not a safe way of doing things. So he worked with Imprivata, a Lexington, Mass.-based technology provider, to launch the HIPAA-compliant Cortext text messaging app at Beaufort, a 197-bed hospital in Beaufort, S.C., with roughly 200 physicians on staff.
Ricks said clinicians were already using their own smartphones to talk to each other, so he'd need a solution that is safe and secure and allows them to continue doing what they like to do. "They're already doing this," he said, "and all I wanted to do was make sure any data was secure."
He figured on recruiting five or six doctors for the pilot. Within a week he had 40, and by the time the two-month pilot had concluded, more than 60 were on board. Now there are about 360 using the app.
"They realized within days that this wasn't about the technology," Ricks said. "It was a workflow issue."
Furthermore, he said, the app, which could be downloaded by doctors on their own devices and nurses on hospital-issued devices, offered an easy means of communication regardless of whether sensitive health information was involved. In other words, it was just simply better than any other communications platform in use.
From that pilot, some advice for healthcare executives: Engage the clinicians early on in the process, and not just the early adopters. Bring in a wide range of people, so that the process can be configured for everyone, no matter how proficient one is with the technology.
It's also important to include auditing capabilities on the platform, Ricks said. Administrators need to know when, where and to whom messages are sent, to ensure that proper care coordination protocols are followed. "Accountability is key," he said.
But this doesn't mean those conversations will find their way into the EHR – at least not yet.
"We've decided that this is informal communication," Ricks explained. "We're not treating it as part of the medical record. … Some day we may change out mind. The technology piece is there. But not right now."
Ricks said the project has proven so successful that the text messaging app will be a requirement of staff from now on, rather than something doctors and nurses can request. And it isn't replacing pagers entirely – certain departments, like anesthesiology, still use voice pagers because they need something that doesn't tie up their hands while they're working.
Ricks will give attendees at the HIMSS15 Conference and Exhibition an update on this project, as well as talking about the hospital's other mHealth initiatives, during a Mobile Health Knowledge Center session on Tuesday, April 14, at the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago. His session, "Improving Clinical Workflows with Fast Access & Communication," runs from 3:15-3:45 p.m. at Booth 8368 in the Exhibit Hall.
