It’s always been somewhat difficult to talk to your doctor. But did you know that she or he has trouble talking to doctors, too?
In this day of cascading communication options – tablets, smartphones, texting and e-mail – doctors are ruing the one thing they can’t seem to do, talking to each other.
They need to have actual conversations — not just leave notes in the EMR or send e-mails — especially if it’s an urgent situation. And as all healthcare providers know, care coordination is one of the most crucial aspects of medicine today. But simply talking is just not something doctors seem to have time for these days.
I have to confess, when I’m busy, I prefer e-mails, so I don’t have to deal with anyone on the phone or face-to-face, I can just have a one-way path to what I need. But many lament what the Internet has done to communication – and relationships – among people.
That includes doctors, too. A primary care doctor may not connect with an ER physician (or even know about) the patient’s visit. A surgeon may not talk to a radiologist who’s not entirely sure what the surgeon is looking for, on the CT scan. An oncologist may not include a primary care doctor in his notes about the patient.
A white paper produced by Amcom Software notes that in its interviews with doctors and hospital management, “there has been an increasing concern that doctors are finding it more difficult to connect with other doctors to have these discussions.”
With all this fancy internet technology, its funny how there can be such a lack of it, writes a blogger at dialme.com. People blame technology for having less family time; everyone’s on their iPad, iPod or Blackberry and who has time to sit at the dinner table and talk? I remember one particularly sad night in a restaurant where a little girl kept trying to get her mother’s attention while mom pounded away on her iPad.
Sadly and scarily, this has extended into the medical world, where doctors need a better way to communicate, too.
The white paper points out that it’s not so unusual that doctors don’t talk because they can be anywhere – in the clinic, on rounds, in the OR, in the lab. And sometimes it’s not clear what the best way to communicate is.
So, Amcom decided to study this and found that some hospitals are putting in communication systems that allow doctors to talk to other doctors more easily and, even better, give them control over how they want to be reached.
For example, for urgent messages, use their smartphones. Not so urgent? E-mail or texting is fine.
Amcom found that the answer for many hospitals is to set up a system to dial a single local number. Each time a call is placed, “this kind of system factors in date/time, message sender, and urgency to determine how best to route the call” to help doctors best coordinate care, the white paper reports. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Doctors have to agree to be part of this, and then participate. But Amcom found it’s helping many hospitals, and doctors, communicate better.
One of the most critical times is patient hand-off, where a mistake can be life-threatening or fatal. With this kind of system, Amcom says, healthcare providers can not miss another call and coordinate patient care better and more efficiently for everyone involved.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
