To Break Down Healthcare Data Siloes and Make the Most of Your Investments, Think Beyond the EMR

Use Smart Bed Data to Support Patient Fall Prevention

Your patients spend more time in bed than anywhere else during their stays. The right smart beds can act as extensions of your care teams, gathering and sharing timely insights to help inform patient care and support continuous improvement initiatives. For example:

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Help Prevent Falls

We designed purposeful integrations between Hillrom Centrella Smart+ Beds and the Voalte clinical communication platform to help alert care teams to patient fall risks quickly with:

• Visual and audible alerts, helping clinicians assess status from a distance and intervene quickly¹
• Mobile alerts sent to the appropriate clinicians’ mobile devices²
• Nurse Call data displaying on graphical stations and status boards³

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Measure Compliance with Patient Fall Prevention Protocols

In addition to timely interventions, you can use reporting to take a retroactive look at protocol compliance and identify areas for improvement. Understand where your teams are meeting expectations — and where additional training may be needed — with historical views of:

• Rail settings⁴
• Bed height⁴
• Bed exit alarm status⁴
• And more⁴

Use Nurse Call Data to Enhance Patient Satisfaction Efforts

Nurse Call systems provide vital lifelines between patients and their caregivers.⁵ These essential systems share a wide variety of information every day — ranging from simple requests to patient risk and bed safety statuses.⁶ Are you using this data to inform your care practices and protocols? Here are just a few examples of how hospitals can break down healthcare data siloes by leveraging readily available Nurse Call data:

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Route Requests & Alerts to the Right Team Members

Voalte Nurse Call provides the data-rich context you need to route each request to the appropriate teammate and help them respond faster.⁷ For example:

• Send pain management requests to the RN
• Send ice chip requests to the CNA
• Send service alerts to Biomeds

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Optimize Usage to Enhance Patient Satisfaction Efforts

Once each alert type is routing to the right team, take a look at retrospective reports to see which targeted improvements could have the greatest impact. For example:

• Could 5% faster responses to patient toileting requests help reduce falls?
• If patients in a certain unit are frequently requesting additional blankets, could a minor heating adjustment impact patient satisfaction scores?
• Could routing certain Nurse Call alerts to your mobile clinical communication solution improve response times in busy units?

With more context providing more useful data, the possibilities for data-driven care improvements are virtually limitless.

Make the Most of Your Patient Monitoring Systems

It’s easy to get bogged down by complex connected patient monitoring systems. Even traditional EHR integrations may fall short without a unified platform to compile and present vital information. With the right medical device integration solution, your care teams can access the real-time monitoring they need, when they need it. For example:

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Keep a Closer Watch

With our Excel Medical Device Integration solution, you can view patient data from Nihon Kohden, GE and Philips monitors on the go,⁸ including:

• Waveforms
• Arterial pressure
• Intracranial pressure
• Central venous pressure
• SpO₂
• Respiratory rate
• CO₂

In addition to sending this data to the EHR…

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Inform Retroactive Research and Studies

The wide-ranging data from these monitors is often helpful for clinical research and quality review analysis. The Excel Medical solution allows you to export data to a spreadsheet or in XML format for analysis and review.ss.

Leverage Mobile Communication Data for Clinical Workflow Optimization

Mobile clinical communication can play a large role in expanding access to timely data, even for teams that don’t use the EHR.

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Elevate What’s Urgent

EHRs alone may not reach all members of the care team or support urgent messages like codes. Mobile communication solutions like Voalte Mobile can help keep teams informed without relying on the EMR for all updates.⁹

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Measure Usage for Better Clinical Workflow Optimization

Look to your mobile communication reporting to see which teams are sending the most text-based messages through the system. These adoption rates can be helpful in correlating communication to a number of other metrics, from response times to patient satisfaction scores to discharge times. Dig into why teams are using the system more or less — then invest in training or open up discussions where needed.