We’re excited to announce the updated version of BeckonCall’s hospital-to-provider communication tool: Contact Providers.

The medical community spends a lot of time discussing the need for interoperability. EHR systems have long been the target of complaints from professionals ranging from nursing staff to hospital administrators. Countless startup companies are building software to integrate various aspects of digital medical records. The idea is to streamline the collection and transmission of patient information so that accurate and actionable insights can be drawn.

Our industry has a long way to go, though. With EHRs, information is for the most part input manually. This increases the burden on medical practitioners from a paperwork standpoint and reduces the time they have available for patients. Valuable features of EHRs are therefore offset by the disruptions they cause. (For an excellent discussion of this debate, please check out this article from FierceHealthcare.) So, what can you do to help move healthcare in the right direction while pushing your practice towards greater integration of health IT tools?

Medicine is stressful. Every aspect of interpersonal relationships, communications, business, finance, operations, and customer service that one would see in any other field are present in medicine. However, layered on top of all that is the simple fact that medicine’s product is healthy human life, and everything gets even more intense. Leaving med school to start a residency, and then finishing residency to take on an attending position, are stressful and intimidating transitions for any young MD. We can’t speak to the challenges of providing actual care, but we did want to give those new physicians reading here our thoughts on communication-related ways to smooth out the process.

Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments.

“Yes, excuse me? Um, my appointment was scheduled for 1:30. It’s 1:48.”

You’ve heard that line and, possibly, delivered that line. Nobody likes that line. That line represents a cost in emotional and financial terms. So, how do we make that line obsolete?

In fact, we have a few ideas. Like them, love them, or hate them, here are several ways to reduce patient wait times at your medical practice.

A word of warning, though: Wait time in and of itself isn’t the ultimate metric. Studies among cancer patients have indicated that the cause of a wait isn’t necessarily correlated with a patient’s favorable/unfavorable perception of a wait, and that a patient’s feelings about a wait depend on more than just raw minutes off the clock. On top of that, a group of orthopedic patients indicated that time with their physician, play a bigger role in - or at least was more associated with - satisfaction than wait time.

Change is coming to Washington, D.C. We don’t pretend to know what that change will look like, and we aren’t going to discuss the politics of everything happening these days. However we, like all of our colleagues in the healthcare space, are watching closely to see how the transition and incoming administration affects healthcare policy. With so much attention directed towards the Affordable Care Act and where it’s headed, we thought this would be a good opportunity to review the evergreen issue of healthcare communications in the context of medical malpractice. As always, this is a brief and casual discussion, nothing in this post constitutes legal/regulatory advice.

We take for granted the volume of data collected and stored during routine exams and medical procedures. What is equally remarkable is this data is collected by means ranging from physical palpation by a provider, to highly calibrated machines and software. Technology to disseminate health data has developed alongside the tools to acquire it, although perhaps not at the same rapid clip.

A few weeks ago we published a post saying that HIPAA compliance in a medical communications platform isn’t enough for that platform to be useful, or even interesting. In that post, we talked about the need to ensure that the secure information being transmitted reaches the correct end-user. Otherwise, what’s the point?

What we didn’t really talk about is one of the roadblocks to getting information to the right person: on-call schedules. Scheduling your group seems like just a management or housekeeping problem. However, it’s far more. It’s a significant communications problem, because a broken schedule adds friction to the process of getting medical information to that end-user, the on-call physician.

Think about it like this: No one ever asks who is on-call for fun. If they ask, it’s because they need to communicate with that provider.

There’s not a lot of ambiguity in the title of this post. Your nurses do, in fact, hate your answering service. We know because they’ve told us.

The simplest reason why is because of the significant discrepancy between what nurses want to be doing each workday and what they actually do. They spend too much time on the phone or filling out paperwork when they want to and should be working with patients. Trying to get in touch with a third party - whether it’s a specialist, send-out lab, imaging facility or even a patient - is an obvious challenge. However, trying to work through an answering service to connect with the on-call physician, a person who in theory should be right there when a need arises, adds an additional layer of unnecessary pain.

Sometimes, even the most amazing technology can be held back by a discomfort with change. People do their best to avoid situations where the perceived risk is greater than the potential payoff, and evolution ensures that the predisposition towards extreme risk taking will never be a predominant trait. This plays out all over society, in decisions big and small. Here at BeckonCall, we’ve been hearing from many practice managers that our service sounds great, but they don’t want to “rock the boat” with their doctors.

In other words, they - you - like the potential payoff but prefer to avoid the risk of problems with other members of your practice.  Which could happen because those physicians, in turn, feel that hypothetical gains from a different piece of healthcare technology don’t sufficiently outweigh the perceived risk of switching.

We want to help you get over these objections so that you can help people in your practice do the same. The ultimate goal is not to make you comfortable with switching healthcare technology solutions for the sake of trying something different, but to be more comfortable with making those changes when the alternative is actually an improvement for your practice. If a company has a better way to do things - and yes, we at BeckonCall are confident that is the case - then we want to help your entire team move beyond the status quo and the easy answer that “it’s always been done that way.”

Here are a few ideas on how you can respond to objections to new technology:

There’s a saying that has floated around the technology industry for the past few years: “Good technology gets out of your way.” It’s not exactly clear where the statement originated, although Google has long subscribed to the idea and used it in media relations. Similarly, though Apple itself does not use the saying, people have pointed to the tech giant’s easy-to-use products as an example of what it means. According to this mentality, a good piece of mass-market technology should act as a catalyst, lowering the energy barrier to accomplish a task. Early adopters may be willing to tolerate extra friction created by a new, imperfect product, but the population at large wants technology that works and makes their lives easier.

Unfortunately, healthcare IT is an industry where progress towards this ideal has been slow. All too many healthtech solutions add rather than reduce frustration and effort. BeckonCall, along with many other healthtech startups, are working to resolve this deficit and give doctors more time to do what’s most important: spending time with their patients. We can’t solve all of the problems you might be facing in your practice when it comes to IT, but we have compiled a few things to consider when you’re looking at adding or changing healthIT solutions at your practice.