Tech could lower healthcare delivery toil by 50%

"Care delivery workflows are replete with toil," according to Runyon. The report says "toil is drudgery and does not contribute to productivity and worker morale." The report continues, "Toil often falls into a few broad categories, such as care team communication, locating people and things, responding to incidents, and patient documentation."

"Orchestrating patient care in a traditional healthcare environment tends to involve a lot of paging, phone calls and waiting for further direction," said Terry Zysk, CEO of LiveProcess. "We believe that Gartner's concept of real-time health systems technology captures the ideal of what we call agile healthcare."

"In an agile healthcare environment, those repetitive, manual tasks that constitute toil can be replaced by flexible, coordinated communication in real time to prompt immediate action," Zysk continued. "The LiveProcess platform has been designed specifically with clinical communication and collaboration needs in mind, to help organizations achieve that level of agility."

Clinical communication and collaboration tools, such as LiveProcess Communicator, can help healthcare organizations manage and streamline many necessary but onerous tasks with interactive mobile communication. All on one device, even from a patient's bedside, LiveProcess allows nurses and other care team members to:

• Coordinate across departments and facilities to summon a physician
• Mobilize an emergency team
• Arrange care transitions
• Fill open nurse shifts
• Coordinate the many steps and people involved in patient discharge

Now in use at hospitals across the U.S., LiveProcess solutions help customers streamline manual tasks that could be considered toil.

Eliminating toil with healthcare leadership
Because many forms of toil have been institutionalized and become part of the organizational culture, a concentrated leadership effort is often necessary to implement the technologies that will enhance care delivery. The Gartner report recommends taking "steps through leadership and staff focus groups and training to overcome the cultural and organizational barriers that resist efforts to reduce toil, such as a reluctance to change long-held practices and an irrational resistance to automation." The report adds, "Increased mobility, situational awareness and operational intelligence, enabled by real-time health system technologies, will make it possible for healthcare provider CIOs and nursing leadership to chip away at care team toil."

Real-time health system technologies are used in many hospitals, nursing homes and long-term care facilities. The report states that "by 2022, 50 percent of the toil embedded in nursing and care team workflows will be reduced or eliminated through targeted automation, artificial intelligence and analytics."

"There are many things responsible for dragging down clinician morale and care team effectiveness in today's high-stress acute care setting, but toil is something that CIOs can address today," the report further states. "Improved care team effectiveness and morale, lower operational costs, and better patient outcomes will result from reducing toil, and time taken away from toil can be used to increase patient engagement."

A complimentary copy of Gartner's September 2017 Healthcare Moment: Enhance Care Team Effectiveness by Eliminating 'Toil' is available for a limited time.

About LiveProcess

Contact
Kelly Flood
[email protected]

SOURCE LiveProcess

Related Links

https://www.liveprocess.com