Among the many hospital-located healthcare delivery needs are two that involve communications and information. The first is efficiently connecting the professionals and workers who are tending to patients and are providing support for them such as obtaining pharmaceuticals and supplies. The second is effectively connecting with patients after discharge so that they follow the courses of treatment, thereby helping to ensure that they do not return unexpectedly. In meeting these needs patient care is improved while costs are controlled.
Avaya has come up with the prescription and course of treatment: a series of enhanced existing and new mobility and automated outreach solutions that enhance care coordination, pre-admissions preparedness and post-discharge care.
“Healthcare professionals need to be instantly reachable and quick to respond in order to deliver the most effective care,” said Sanjeev Gupta, general manager of Avaya’s Healthcare Solutions group. “Avaya’s solutions help speed up hospital clinical processes, and remove the barriers that can frustrate healthcare professionals. Our solutions – and the tools we are introducing today – are designed to drive streamlined communications within an industry where every second counts.”
These solutions are:
* Avaya Mobile Device Checkout 3.0
Mobile Device Checkout 3.0 supersedes the 2.0 version inherited from Nortel; it now supports Avaya call server platforms. It also frees hospital staff from the nurses’ and other stations by enabling communications from anywhere on hospital grounds using personalized wireless LAN (WLAN)-enabled mobile devices; they are no longer limited to hospital-issued units.
Mobile Device Checkout 3.0 addresses then the issue of healthcare staff availability. Issuing personal numbers avoids the time-consuming hassle of tracking, paging and connecting hospital workers to followup calls as it is rare for them with the older method to have the same numbers each time they sign in. The solution supports call forwarding for cellular phone interactions.
* Avaya Patient Follow-up
This new solution enables hospitals to use automated outreach to call and follow up with patients after their discharge from these facilities. It uses voice automation to ask customized questions based on a patient’s medical records and their reason for hospitalization.
Avaya Patient Follow-up is a superior tool to generic automated followup products for this vital purpose in that it is designed to be integrated into EMR systems using HL7 standards. Patient call lists are then automatically available to the application: including patient contact information and diagnosis which can be used to choose correct/relevant follow-up scripts. The application can also provide information back into the clinical record using HL7.
* Avaya Patient Admit Coordinator
Avaya Patient Admit Coordinator uses multi-modal communications to accelerate and coordinate hospital admittance for patients recently treated in emergency rooms (ERs). Patient Admit Coordinator can reduce the overall admit time from the ERs by nearly 40 percent. It also frees up paramedics to handle calls. Wallace points out that in many hospitals, patients brought in by paramedics that are not urgent and critical can get stuck in line for beds too. Until the hospital accepts the patient - they remain in paramedic care in the hallways - tying up paramedics for extended periods of time.
Brendan B. Read is HealthTechZone’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Jennifer Russell
