Too Much Information is Overwhelming Doctors, Hospitals

They’re supposed to make our lives easier, smartphones and tablets, allowing us to hook up with anyone anywhere at any time. But hospitals are finding that this may not be such a good thing, especially when it comes to technology that beeps and rings and flashes and buzzes – which, come to think of it, is just about every device we’ve come to love. 

A white paper by Amcom Software , a source of unified communications technology, asks: wasn’t it easier, in some ways, when you just had to reach the operator? The piece was posted by healthcareitnews.com.

“Finding time for face-to-face conversations wasn’t a monumental task,” the source stated. “The elite few who carried pagers knew that if they beeped, something important was happening. People communicated through paper charts instead of physician conversations, wrote key phone numbers on grease boards, and kept on-call schedules in binders.”

It points out that communications today have grown into “intricate webs of guesswork, unknown mobile devices, confusing schedules and just too many systems going ‘beep.’”  Hospitals are finding that patient monitors can cause a major deterrent to healing when they’re beeping and buzzing all the time. 

Even scarier, because doctors and nurses have become so used to them, they don’t always respond as quickly as they should when they indicate someone is in trouble. The Chicago Tribune puts it best: “Hospitals Drowning in Noise.”

But it’s not just noise; it’s all the data the devices constantly give us. Doctors receive texts and messages from other doctors, are asked to look at and provide scans, answer questions, track test data, as information floods in around them from cell phones, smart phones, tablets – not to mention PCs – all while trying to see and care for patients.   

And just what happens when doctors are overwhelmed by all the information coming at them? A 2007 study of Veterans’ Administration (VA) doctors found that they “failed to acknowledge receipt of 368 electronically transmitted alerts about abnormal imaging tests during the study period.”  

In four percent of the cases, imaging-test results hadn’t been followed up on four weeks after the test was done, according to Kevin Pho, MD.

Pho writes about another study that showed that only 10.2 percent of abnormal lab test results went unacknowledged by doctors, but 6.8 percent of the cases were not followed up on quickly enough. He calls it “alert overload.”

“There’s so much data that we risk doctors becoming lost in it,” Westby G. Fisher told Anne Zeiger of Hospital EHR and EMR. “It is entirely possible that we are in danger of not being able to find our most important clinical signals amongst the noise and clutter of all the data.” 

Often the data even resides on different systems that may not even “talk” to each other.

The white paper agrees. “The fact is that in most hospitals, there is simply too much information being generated.” So at the end of the day, how do hospitals get control of this “swirl of information,” all clamoring for attention?

The white paper advises hospitals to begin by connecting their “islands of information” – cell phones, desk phones, smartphones, voice badges, e-mail systems, LED boards, tablets and Wi-Fi-connected phones – using middleware to act as a hub to prioritize information and get it to the right person, giving organizations a “global view” of who’s sending information, and who’s receiving it. 

It also recommends setting up tracking and routing systems where hospitals can automatically route abnormal test results from the lab to a doctor on his or her cell phone for immediate action. 

So what’s the answer? Organize and automate systems to pull together data, devices and routines into one coherent whole that everyone can understand and use.