How to improve communications through EHR scheduling software 

Dr. Patrick Guffey is chief medical information officer at Children's Hospital Colorado.

Courtesy: Children's Hospital Colorado

Dr. Patrick J. Guffey, chief medical information officer at Children's Hospital Colorado, is on a mission to get rid of pagers.

Most are not HIPAA-compliant. There's no link from pager to the EHR without manual transcription. It's another device physicians have to carry in addition to their smartphones, Guffey said. 

But most physicians carry one anyway. 

"Use of pagers is very widespread in healthcare," he said.

Last year, Children's Hospital Colorado deployed an enterprise-wide provider scheduling system within the EHR that allows for the use of smartphones for communications. The care team is able to identify the appropriate person to message and send the message within the same application used for clinical care. Patients can be linked into the messaging.

Guffey will explain this at the HIMSS22 session, "Eliminating Pagers and the Future of Healthcare Communication" Tuesday, March 15, from noon to 1 p.m., Room W300, in the Orange County Convention Center.

"One of the benefits from doing this is cost savings of $200,000 in pager costs," Guffey said.

Physicians use their own smartphones and carry them anyway, Guffey said. 

The application was included in the EHR at minimal cost and is integrated to the online scheduling software. It allows everybody to see who is where, instead of searching to find out who's on call.

"There's no more hunting of who to contact," he said. "The system will tell us when a surgeon is in the middle of an operation."

Or that surgeon can put in the message, "'I'm on vacation,'" he said.

The application installed in the EHR allows for secure access to receive or transmit messages. Conversations can become part of the medical record if needed, he said.

It's a synchronous communication system for conversations to go back and forth in real time, rather than waiting for callbacks after receiving messages on the pager.
 
"It's aligning the type of communication with the urgency of the communication," Guffey said. 

The way pagers work, a person enters a phone number and is called back.

"You get the message, find a phone, get the number and talk to the person," Guffey said.

Two-way text pagers can send short messages back and forth, but unless the pager is upgraded to an encrypted pager, the messages don't meet full security measures.

The other benefit of the new system is that it helps alleviate burnout for clinicians who are still struggling with the pandemic. 

"It's aligning the urgency," Guffey said, "while respecting the provider's time."

Twitter: @SusanJMorse
Email the writer: SMorse@himss.org