Coordinated Care Management

May 01, 2012

Experts Say Collaboration on Care Through Mobility is the Answer to Healthcare Today



With a booming aging population, the exploding costs of healthcare and the inability of many clinical practices and hospitals yet to adopt electronic medical records (EMR), there’s still a way it can all come together.

According to Bruce Brandes, it’s mobility.

Interviewed by Chris Silva, Brandes, the executive vice president and chief strategy officer at AirStrip Technologies, said that with 30 million more patients entering the healthcare system who have more complex clinical conditions, just as the number of providers is declining, a new way to collaborate is an absolute must if we’re to meet the medical needs of our aging population.

“Communication errors, which are currently the No. 1 cause of avoidable patient harm in a hospital, will become more significantly profound if we do not find a new way to collaborate,” he told Silva.

Brandes says that the “technical and cultural revolutions” that mobility is bringing us “have the potential to single-handedly address the care coordination problem.”

Enter smartphones and tablets. Now physicians can be in touch with their offices anywhere, anytime – see patient scans, review notes from other doctors and make informed decisions as easily from an airplane as their desk chair. 

From remotely bringing specialists to far-flung rural hospitals, to monitoring diabetes patients’ blood glucose levels from their homes, to making sense of the massive amounts of data pouring in from everywhere, mobile devices are bringing the hospital, doctor and patient together to provide better, less costly treatment for all.

Pulling together core clinical information and patient monitoring systems so all clinicians have access, all the time, or “sharing information across a community,” is the answer, Brandes told Silva. 

And that’s where mobility comes in. Using mobile devices, providers can be in touch all the time sharing healthcare information with other cliniciains, making it possible to collaborate on care, anywhere, anytime. 

“Mobility is what makes possible “the on-the-go realities and requirements of physicians, nurses and clinical managers,” Brandes told Silva.




Edited by Braden Becker
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. [Free eNews Subscription]