How Banner Health Modernized Clinical Communications, Collaboration

As a leading health system and accountable care organization, patient safety is top of mind for leaders at Banner Health. The health system embarked on a journey to modernize clinical communication and collaboration by leveraging technology to connect physicians and care team members in real time to prevent medical errors, improve patient satisfaction, and streamline the clinician’s experience.

Communication breakdowns, historically, have been one of the leading causes of preventable medical errors, according to Sherri Hess, MS-IS, BSN, RN-BC, FHIMSS, chief nursing informatics officer at Banner Health.

Whether it is a patient fall or a delay in care, better communication across care teams can prevent these medical errors. Improving clinical communication workflows helps support the collaboration needed to improve patient safety, patient outcomes, patient satisfaction, and the clinician experience.

In the past at Banner Health, one of the largest nonprofit health systems with 30 hospitals and hundreds of other care sites across six states, clinical staff relied on multiple devices. Those devices included the traditional pager, a microphone-speaker combination device that clipped onto the staff’s person, and the hospital’s overhead communication system.

However, Banner realized that using multiple devices could hinder care coordination. For example, if physicians needed to discuss a patient’s case with a nurse, they might not know which nurse is working on the case and the nurse may already be in another patient’s room by the time they find out.

“They just know they need to talk to the nurse taking care of their patient,” Hess explains. “So they call the nurse’s station and from there, the unit clerk answers the phone, then has to find the nurse, which depending on which hospital you are at, there could be some inefficiency there.”

Leveraging modern technology for integrated communication

An overwhelming majority of hospitals are making investments in smartphones and secure mobile communication platforms to improve care delivery and communication across members of the care team.

Banner Health is one of those health systems seeing better collaboration among nurses, physicians, and other staff members after making the transition to smarter modes of communication. As part of its efforts to modernize communications, improve nurse experience, and boost patient safety, the health system invested in CareAware Connect, an integrated communication system from Cerner.

Hess says that with the new strategy, clinicians have a variety of ways to communicate and collaborate but through a single platform.

Banner Health, for example, acquired healthcare-specific smartphones that only work in the hospital system and include a scanner for more efficient care. Nurses use the smartphones with the communications solution to relay messages—text messages, calls, and even images—to collaborate with physicians and the entire care team.

Meanwhile, physicians are able to download an app to the smartphones they use for work to securely communicate with other care team members via the integrated system.

The technology also enables better care at the patient’s bedside by pushing notifications, such as a sepsis risk alert, so clinicians can address risks while the patient is in front of them. With the traditional clinical communication method, clinicians might need to utilize a workstation on wheels in the patient room or find a desktop computer to log into the EHR system and review a patient’s chart.

“We know we could get it done quicker if that pops up right away,” Hess states.

Benefits of modern clinical communication

Since the start of implementation in November 2020, Hess has tracked a variety of metrics to measure the success of clinical communication improvements. Those metrics include length of stay, patient falls, barcode medication administration scanning rates, sepsis identification, and patient satisfaction. With the latter measure, Banner Health uses HCAHPS survey data from patients on whether they got help as soon as they wanted it, received assistance with going to the bathroom, and if the hospital was quiet at night.

“For every one of those measures, Banner hospitals live on this functionality have improved compared to our other hospitals that aren’t on [the solution],” Hess says.

Hess also noticed unanticipated improvements as a result of modernizing the clinical communication workflow. In one instance, better communication enabled nurses to get an item from central supply faster and, therefore, deliver care more efficiently.

“What a nurse calls an item and what central supply calls it can be two different things,” Hess explains. “Sometimes central supply would have to bring up the item and ask nurses if it was the item they were requesting. That meant walking it all the way up, all the way back, then come back again to get what the nurse wanted.”

Image messages via smartphones helped to make the process more efficient by enabling communication between nurses and central supply staff before an item got to a patient’s room.

Enterprise-wide adoption is key to success

Getting all care team members on the clinical communication devices and platform at implementation was key to Banner Health’s overall success, according to Hess.

The health system, for example, was able to get physicians on board with the strategy by tailoring to their needs. Physicians could use an app on their phones versus picking up the healthcare-specific smartphone since they tend to move around the health system more to care for patients and the phones only work in the hospital setting.

Ensuring critical care team members, like physicians, buy into the modern clinical communication strategy is key to its success. Convenient communication channels, such as text message, allow nurses to send images to physicians, who can initiate a change in treatment if necessary.

But physician and nurse adoption are the tip of the iceberg for modern clinical communication systems.

“Don’t just focus on your clinical staff,” Hess advises other organizations. “We implemented the technology with everybody in the hospital on day one because if you only start with one or two pieces, then the end user may not find value. Implement it with everybody to get down to that one way to communicate.”

By getting everyone on a common communications platform, health systems can reduce the amount of time staff spent tracking down clinicians and increase the amount of time spent caring for their patients. Improving the efficiency of clinicians and supporting staff is key.

___________________________

About Cerner

We are continuously building on our foundation of intelligent solutions for the healthcare industry. Our technologies connect people and systems, and our wide range of services support the clinical, financial and operational needs of organizations of every size.