In these uncertain times, the healthcare industry is undergoing a significant shift to modernize and adopt new technologies to overcome their current challenges and thus improve patient care specially in emergency departments.
Healthcare is a complex and unpredictable field, with professionals from a variety of disciplines involved in providing care at various times throughout the day from several locations, communication amongst the healthcare professionals as well as providing agile response are key.
VNEXT worked closely with Microsoft to help a healthcare organization digitalize their on-call list and schedules to reduce communication gaps and optimize their processes during the pandemic.
The Challenge
The client was experiencing complaints around the response time, and it was facing difficulties to contacting and scheduling physicians as well as some other related internal communication issues.
The organization’s IT staff wanted to pilot a more modern and efficient process for on-call physicians to reduce response time and manual tasks and to minimize internal communication overhead.
To articulate some of the innovative ideas the customer wanted to introduce, I’d like to share an example of one of the scenarios they were trying to tackle.
Consider a scenario where ‘Doctor A’ needs to engage an on-call physician (Doctor B) into the emergency room. The ‘admin staff’ relies on ‘scheduling team’ for the communication of on-call schedules which creates additional delays. Thus, patients must wait longer before being treated when staff has difficulty reaching the doctor on-call. In addition, each time the department pages the wrong doctor due to misinformation on the call schedule, the quality of the patient experience is diminished, and care can be potentially compromised.
The solution: On- call process solution built on Microsoft 365 cloud
To address all the challenges faced by the customer, at VNEXT, we came up with a solution that enabled them to securely collaborate and communicate. Built on the secure and compliant Microsoft 365 cloud, the ‘On-Call Process’ solution helped the customer to identify faster a doctor on-call by eliminating the manual processes involved in creating and updating the schedules.
We knew that as Healthcare is changing and technology is taking center stage, digitalizing the on-call list and schedules for the hospital, would help reduce communication times with on-call physicians and thus improve patient care in emergency departments. This trend towards digitization, will allows physicians to focus more on their patients, spending more time with them while optimizing their processes and increasing productivity.
The solution overview:
We leveraged the following Office 365 applications to build a holistic and fully customized ‘On-Call process’ solution for the hospital:
- Shifts: To manage, log or update schedule for their Teams.
- Power Automate: To trigger a flow in regular intervals to list all shifts in a SharePoint list.
- SharePoint List: Then the list is updated with current time each time the flow runs and additional information like department, contact information, and other data that will be pulled from Active Directory.
- PowerApps: The On-Call tracker built on PowerApps is used to identify the doctor On-Call in real-time. This tracker has features like filter by department, search by name or department. Additionally, it also gives the ability to look out for a doctor’s shift for any day in future.
The Benefits and Results
From the centralized on-call list, authorized staff can now easily identify on-call doctors based on the specialization needed or their availability, ensuring agile response. This reduces communication delays between administrative staff and is particularly critical in emergency situations.
The management, physicians and administrative staff have now access to the on-call list with a display adapted to their role within the organization. When the schedules change or are updated, the data shows up in the centralized on-call list, allowing real-time information to be disseminated to all hospital staff. Other key benefits of the On-call process are:
- Introduced efficiency by replacing a four-step manual process involving multiple teams with a complete automated workflow.
- Real time identification of on-call physicians with easier communication and notifications leveraging standard Microsoft 365 collaboration tools.
- Access to up-to-date availabilities and contact information to reach Physicians from different specialties easily and faster.
- Integration of legacy scheduling systems and processes into the solution.
- Modernized and self-serve schedule solution to empower physicians on-call to manage their schedule.
In conclusion, by automating on-call and scheduling processes, healthcare organizations can enhance clinical precision, reduce human error, improve patient satisfaction while increasing practice productivity with Office 365 solutions.
Automating healthcare processes is the new normal, and if you’re not already there, it’s time you get on board. Click here to take a look at the complete pre-packaged solution or Connect with us to get started.
