Here’s how Virtual Rounding can help Healthcare Providers improve patient delivery and care!
As healthcare organizations go digital while looking for strategies to streamline hospital management and improve patient satisfaction, patient rounds are an important part of the patient care process. Researchers have shown organizations that have successfully implemented rounding have significant decreased in adverse patient events, as well as important levels of improvement in patient and staff satisfaction. However, it can be challenging for healthcare providers to maintain organized the rounding.
Rounding is an essential practice ensuring that your patients are being monitored by multiple types of providers, during this COVID days. This represents a huge drain on PPE, as each visit, to each provider, a new mask, and new set of gloves must be used. But…what if patients could still have frequent check-ins virtually. Allow for virtual rounding to help reduce risk and drain on PPE.
Virtual rounding relies on an easy concept. Rounds are conducted virtually, through Microsoft Teams between the providers and the patients.
Features
- A patient interface can block the patient from doing most anything besides talking to a provider who has “dropped in”.
- An intuitive system helps providers to match your hospital/clinic setup.
- Security features maintain patient privacy and prevent inadvertent exposure of PHI data.
Benefits:
- Through the use of virtual rounding, providers like you may be physically exposed to fewer patients per day, which may limits their risk factors for contracting COVID-19 (and other communicable ailments), it could also keep these providers able to care for patients longer.
- Through the use of virtual rounding in Microsoft Teams, the use of PPE may go down. This could ensure PPE remains in hospitals for crucial situations and help reduce future risks to providers.
- Through the use of virtual rounding in Microsoft Teams, providers may spend less time walking between patient rooms, increasing their efficiency during this time of increased demand during COVID-19.
How does it work?
- Each “patient room” is setup with a Microsoft 365 account with Teams application on a device (and ideally locked down with Intune MDM Kiosk policies).
- Custom Teams policies allows each account to disable non-essential features.
- Teams meetings are setup for each patient room account (with that account as a host), lasting a large amount of days (hopefully past the end of COVID-19).
- Teams create each site for providers, along with individual channels for sub-locations like floors.
- SharePoint lists create and add to each channel as a tab listing that allows the meeting to happen.
Here’s how it looks to the provider:
Providers can access a list of rooms in Microsoft Teams and can select a room to drop in on. Providers can then select another patient to drop in on, communicate with other providers on the floor through Microsoft Teams, or follow-up with patients in-person if needed.
FAQ:
- What if the patient needs in-person care, such a temperature check, or blood test?
Microsoft Teams determines any additional in-person testing that is necessary. It also may limit the frequency of daily in-person check-ins by moving them to a virtual platform.
- How can we ensure this solution is secure?
Microsoft Teams is a natively secure application; however, we are suggesting putting it in front of a patient instead of an employee. Microsoft Teams policies and Conditional Access policies once implemented ensures a secure patient experience. Please see the documentation for more details.
- Is this HIPAA compliant?
Please see this link to learn how Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams offer compliance with HIPAA. Additionally, this solution prevents the patient from entering any PHI into the device to ensure full patient privacy.
Want to learn more?
If you would like to book a DEMO of the solution, and discuss how to continue with the digital transformation of your healthcare organization, reach out VNEXT experts here to support you during the process.
