Healthcare organizations should pay close attention to scenarios that reduce human latency, lead to tangible gain from faster and richer interactions.
The modern healthcare organization operates in an ever-challenging environment. It must fulfill its primary mission of providing high-quality patient care, while also addressing economic realities that require maximum operating efficiency and minimal costs. What’s more, healthcare is highly regulated; data and information resources must meet strict requirements for privacy and protection. These requirements often extend beyond the traditional enterprise boundaries, thanks to programs such as telemedicine, and the need to support contract-based workers.
Unified communications can help meet all these requirements by reducing communication complexity, integrating disparate applications, and tying communications services directly to specific business process to reduce human latency.
In healthcare, this includes responding to a patient phone call, an alarm in a hospital room, or the need for a nurse or physician to contact a colleague to discuss patient care or schedule an appointment.
To reduce human latency, the staff must have tools that let them quickly locate the appropriate resource for an inquiry, determine their availability, and connect them to a call, regardless of location and/or device. Nemertes defines this approach as “Just-In-Time-Fetch-The-Expert (JITFTE).” The principle behind JITFTE is that IT architects can determine tangible business benefits for UC by measuring before-and-after times for specific business processes.
For example, it may take 10 minutes for a nurse clerk to call multiple numbers, issue pages, and ultimately locate a physician to whom a nurse needs to talk about a patient need. Then, when the physician calls back, the nurse may be unavailable, dealing with another patient. Then, phone tag starts. Contrast that with a clerk having presence data on the physician listing the various forms of communication available (e.g. voice, mobile phone or text messaging). The nurse then uses the available channel, perhaps even transferring the call to a wireless device worn around the neck, all within minutes.
In this example unified communications delivers measurable productivity metrics, such as reduced time to respond, or quantifiable return on investment data, such as fewer clerks required on a hospital floor, or measurable effect on customer satisfaction, such as better patient ratings of their stay.
Working with a number of healthcare organizations, Nemertes has uncovered several scenarios in which UC is meeting these challenges, leading to tangible customer care, operational and cost-management benefits.
Given the numerous opportunities for UC to provide tangible business benefit for healthcare, it’s no surprise that more than 73% of healthcare organizations participating in Nemertes’ research are deploying or planning to deploy UC.
Still, healthcare interest in UC lags the enterprise market as a whole, with only 27% of healthcare organizations deploying UC vs. 47% of all participating industries.
This means that healthcare firms that more aggressively deploy UC can realize a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
Many healthcare companies already have the components of UC in place, even if they haven’t begun the process of integration. Nemertes finds adoption of certain UC applications such as Web conferencing, instant messaging, mobility integration, and IP-enabled contact centers is typically about 20% higher among healthcare firms than among the overall enterprise.
This high rate of adoption implies that the real challenge for many healthcare firms is integrating applications and tying them to business processes, rather than making significant investments in new infrastructure.
Unified communications offers tangible and quantifiable benefits for healthcare organizations looking to improve operational efficiencies.
Through the deployment of UC, healthcare firms can improve customer service, maximize resource efficiency, meet compliance requirements, and create new revenue opportunities.
Healthcare organizations should develop specific business cases for the use of UC technologies within their particular environment, paying close attention to scenarios that reduce human latency, leading to tangible gain from faster and richer interactions.
