Communication, EHR integration improve patient experience: Communication, integration improve patient experience

EHR integration with communication devices can dramatically improve caregiver efficiency, patient care and satisfaction while reducing errors and attendant patient risk.

So says Liz Michael, vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer at Stillwater Medical Center, a 117-bed acute care not-for-profit hospital in Oklahoma. Michael was presenting at the 2016 HIMSS conference in Las Vegas.

Typically, hospital communication challenges include bring your own device (BYOD) issues, care team communication and collaboration, alarm fatigue for patients and staff and EHR integration and communication. The challenges at Stillwater, Michael says, centered around inefficient mobile collaboration and a cumbersome physician computerized prescription order entry (CPOE) system.

Nurses and respiratory therapists at Stillwater are highly mobile, so a key improvement was to route patient call requests directly to nursing staff instead of the nursing station. These requests can be escalated directly to other staff when caregivers were tied up at the bedside for...