TigerConnect

More hospitals are hiring Chief Patient Experience Officers, and as the role matures, we’re learning that patients want to see evidence of exceptional communication, both with their clinicians and between their clinicians.

Digital technology makes healthcare organizations more effective and efficient, reducing the potential for human error and speeding clinical communications. But it can also threaten patient privacy. Congress recognized this risk in the mid-90s — a decade before smartphones and nearly 15 years before required electronic health records (EHR) — and passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). This legislation sets national standards for patient privacy and, eventually, for healthcare data security as well.

Customer privacy and cybersecurity are critical issues for most industries, but none more than healthcare. Thanks to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), health data is highly protected. It’s also the most valuable data on the black market, where medical records are worth $250 apiece. The next highest price tag is just $5.40 for payment records.

Another page comes across the overhead speakers on your floor. You listen diligently to discover the request is for a Code Blue… not your team. Although none of the day’s pages have been directed at you, it’s critical that you’re alert and attuned when the time comes. As you resume your duties, concentration broken, you take a second to collect your thoughts and recall what you were thinking just moments ago. The most prevalent thought now being on the time you’ve once again lost to disruption.

This interoperability story is still emerging. FHIR is the newer, upcoming standard for data exchange. Vendors are just beginning to exploit it. The industry should see useful developments over the next five years.

Let’s look at seven benefits of nursing informatics and what a healthcare system would be like without nursing informatics. We’d manage, surely. But our healthcare system is much better off with nurse informaticists doing their thing, being a remarkable gift to society.

Telehealth alone is not enough to promote patient engagement and resolve care delivery deficits – a communication strategy with video, voice, secure texting and EHR integration capabilities that can be used seamlessly with the interdisciplinary care team, AND with patients and families is necessary to improve outcomes and experience

Nursing autonomy is characterized by nurses thinking and acting by themselves without seeking approval. A broader description comes from the American Nurses Association’s Magnet Recognition Program. This program identifies 14 Forces of Magnetism, and the ninth Force is nursing autonomy. Read more.

Therapeutic communication techniques are a standard part of nurse and therapist training. That makes sense, because:

• Nurses spend more time with hospital patients than do other clinicians
• Many patients require extensive physical, occupational, or speech therapy to complete their healing

Like so many of you, we here at TigerConnect were crushed to learn that HIMSS20 had been canceled. But we get it. It was a regrettable but completely responsible decision by the HIMSS team, particularly for an event where the majority of attendees are also the frontline defense against the very reason for the cancellation – Coronavirus COVID-19.