With an industry shift toward measuring and rewarding better patient outcomes, we have been seeing a renewed focus on the point of care experience. We also know that factors such as long wait times or accessibility challenges can negatively impact a patient’s experience as well as the quality of care provided. When patients feel safe, comfortable and empowered, better outcomes are more attainable.

These patient considerations are intensified today as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to reshape and challenge the patient care experience within acute and ambulatory healthcare settings. Layer COVID-19 on top of the common phenomenon of “white coat syndrome” and a visit to the doctor’s office can become a difficult experience for a patient. This amplifies the need to ensure the patient experience is safe and non-stressful.

By evolving exam room design, workflow data and equipment to meet today’s challenges, healthcare organizations can facilitate a better experience for both patients and caregivers. The following are elements of the patient care experience where COVID-19 is acting as a catalyst for accelerated evolution at the point of care.

Exposure to Contagions

Due to its high transmission rates, COVID-19 has heightened the awareness of environmental exposures for both patients and healthcare organizations. As a result, policies and practices have been instituted to help minimize exposure.

Self- and direct-rooming approaches have been gaining attention as a way to minimize exposure to contagions. Patients check in for their appointment and proceed directly to an exam room or diagnostic sub-waiting location either on their own, like at a hotel, or escorted by a staff member. The most efficient way to know which exam rooms are immediately available is with real-time locating system (RTLS) technology. Patients receive locator badges at check-in and staff use RTLS software to identify which rooms are clean and ready for a new patient. The concept is popular with patients—95 percent of participating patients preferred checking in and proceeding directly to an exam room (self-rooming or direct-rooming) as compared to conventional rooming from a waiting area.

RTLS technology can also automate a contact tracing process for easier exposure identification. When RTLS badges are worn, organizations can easily identify individuals that have been exposed to a known contagious person at the granularity of numbers of seconds that individual was exposed as opposed to manual tracing by administrative staff. This data offers powerful evidence to support exposure control and can help keep patients safe.

Long Wait Times

While traditionally not viewed as part of the patient-caregiver interaction, the waiting room could potentially have a negative impact on patient experience–especially if the wait is perceived to be too long. As patients move throughout a facility to various locations for diagnostic testing or other ancillary services, waiting in the lobby or the exam room can disrupt a patient’s visit and potentially foster the transmission of a contagion.

A better way is to take a more patient-centric approach to care delivery with the Collaborative Care Model—allowing patients to remain in one location during their visit. This approach helps to decrease the patient’s overall length of stay while optimizing the patient’s visit by allowing multiple caregivers to collaborate on their care plan. RTLS technology enhances this model by providing greater visibility to identify the exact location of patients and outlining the steps that need to take place during the visit.

The dynamic room assignment model is another way to limit wait times and better utilize rooms. It eliminates the “physician-owned” exam room by assigning patients and caregivers to the first-available room. This fluid allocation of resources provides the flexibility to deal with unexpected patient emergencies, walk-in patients, or, in certain cases, the extra capacity can be used to add additional physicians or allow for specialist visits to be added to the schedule.

Healthcare Everywhere

A fully accessible facility design that can be navigated easily by everyone – both patients and caregivers – is critical to providing safe, quality care and improving patient outcomes.

An important piece of the point of care ecosystem is the mobile workstation. Workstations have been a central fixture in most exam rooms for many years, designed to streamline workflows and support interactions occurring within that space. While clinical encounters have traditionally occurred in an exam room setting where caregivers meet with patients in person, that practice is being challenged. Advanced technology and the shift to create a more accessible patient-centered experience are driving the need to expand the point of care outside the traditional model.

This shift has been further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some organizations have been forced to establish triage sites to meet demand from growing patient populations, while many others are being forced to take a renewed look at patient-caregiver interactions and how care can be delivered safely and effectively to achieve improved outcomes. Mobile workstations offer an optimal platform for introducing telehealth, providing an ideal location for the monitor and necessary storage.

All of these factors are placing workstations front and center in the evolution and expansion of the point of care, helping ensure the time shared between the caregiver and patient remains the most important, meaningful and unobstructed aspect of the healthcare journey. By creating a fully connected ecosystem where processes, equipment and caregivers are integrated, healthcare organizations help ensure a seamless patient experience.

Most healthcare organizations understand that the interaction between the patient and caregiver at the point of care is a foundational element of effective healthcare. However, many organizations fail to fully recognize how the entire point of care ecosystem, which goes beyond the direct interaction between patient and caregiver, has an effect on improving the overall experience, including clinical outcomes.

It’s safe to say COVID-19 will continue to reshape the healthcare experience in our country—and patients will continue to expect a better care experience. The patient experience should continue to be the driving focus behind everything from practice design for comfort, efficiencies and workflow to technology to ensure the delivery of patient care is improved. A better patient care experience starts with a better designed care environment.

Kurt Forsthoefel serves as director, medical marketing, for Midmark.

The post COVID-19: A Catalyst for Improved Patient Experiences appeared first on HCO News.

As health care continues to undergo significant change, health care organizations are looking for innovative solutions, new approaches, proven processes and best practices that mirror their increasing focus on the patient-caregiver experience. There is growing interest in anything that can enhance patient and caregiver experiences and improve the quality of ambulatory medical care.

Most health care organizations understand that the patient-caregiver interaction at the point of care is a foundational element of effective health care. However, many organizations fail to fully recognize how the point of care ecosystem affects the overall experience, including clinical outcomes.

Traditionally, caregivers viewed a patient visit as everything that happened during the direct patient-caregiver interaction. While the interaction in the exam room is a focal point, the point of care ecosystem actually encompasses everything that happens within the practice or clinic, as well as experiences that occur outside of this environment.

As engaged health care organizations work to better understand the point of care ecosystem through the lens of a complex integrated system, they quickly realize just how disconnected some of these processes and components truly are.

Seamless Patient Experience

A fully connected point of care ecosystem is becoming more of a reality as new technologies with greater connectivity are introduced to the industry. This connected ecosystem integrates processes, equipment and caregivers at the point of care to significantly enhance the patient and caregiver experience and improve the quality of ambulatory care. It also ensures a more satisfying and seamless patient experience by providing a platform where organizations can leverage new technologies, incorporate best practices and employ greater standardization to improve care and outcomes.

1. Greater Visibility

Today’s medical practices are complex organisms, often featuring many disconnected processes, devices and components. Most health care organizations find it difficult to determine exactly how their practices are performing and where opportunities exist for improvements or efficiency gains.

However, new technologies and tools are helping bring visibility to existing processes, giving organizations the insight they need to make data-driven business decisions. As organizations gain greater awareness of the entire ecosystem, they are better positioned to make additional optimizations to ultimately enhance patient care.

For instance, real-time locating systems (RTLS), which have been used in hospitals for many years, are quickly becoming a key component of a connected point of care ecosystem in outpatient facilities.

This data-driven understanding of workflows provides in-the-moment situational awareness of the ecosystem. This allows healthcare professionals to proactively escalate responses to problem areas and monitor key performance indicators in real time.

2. Standardized Approach

The continuing consolidation of medical practices is occurring at such a pace that many organizations are finding it difficult to establish network-wide operational and clinical standards. Many health systems simply tolerate the variability in outpatient environments, not realizing the costs associated with having little to no key performance metrics in place.

Standardization helps organizations develop clinical protocols that drive better outcomes. It can also create efficiencies and cost savings, as well as minimize human variables that increase the likelihood of errors that can contribute to inaccurate diagnoses. One area where this is evident is blood pressure (BP) measurement, which continues to be one of the most inconsistently performed tests in a clinical environment. But, it also has perhaps the strongest connection to point of care diagnosis, patient risk stratification and medication dosing.

A fully connected point of care ecosystem helps facilitate and ensure a level of standardization to minimize human variables and maximize consistency and data accuracy. Connected diagnostic devices used in conjunction with a connected exam table that automatically positions the patient to achieve an accurate reading allow caregivers to measure blood pressure more consistently through established electronic checklists. It can also directly import patient data into electronic medical records (EMR) and help facilitate the adherence to a health system’s clinical guidelines for proper technique in achieving BP readings.

3. Greater Efficiency

A fully connected point of care ecosystem allows caregivers to not only identify opportunities to improve efficiencies, but to also more easily and accurately measure progress and success.

For example, one area where efficiency gains can be realized is vital signs acquisition. The vital signs process hasn’t changed significantly in the last 30 years, and today’s processes often include multiple stopping points in a facility to capture base vital signs (height, weight, pulse, temperature and blood pressure). Some of these locations are in semi-public spaces. These disconnected processes result in significant inefficiencies and lost patient and caregiver time.

A Midmark study examined potential workflow efficiencies during the acquisition of vital signs, as well as the interaction between patients and caregivers, in an effort to identify near-and long-term implications for efficiency. Care interaction was observed from the time the patient was called from the waiting room, through vital signs acquisition, to the time the patient was ready to see the physician. The average time was five minutes, seven seconds.

Results of the Midmark study indicated that minor changes in workflow and design, such as collecting vital signs in the exam room and implementing automated vital signs connected directly to an EMR, could reduce conveyance and acquisition time by as much as 36 percent per patient.

4. Enhanced Patient-Caregiver Interaction

Patient-caregiver interaction in the exam space is a foundational element in the continuum of care. Traditionally, the face-to-face exam was seen as the only significant interaction between the patient and the primary care provider. However, growing focus on population health is encouraging health care organizations to think in broader terms. With the advent of the patient-centered medical home, care is often delivered by care teams that can include providers, nurses, ancillary staff and care coordinators.

When viewed from the lens of a point of care ecosystem, the patient-caregiver interaction becomes every touch point that the patient has with the health care organization, including, but not limited to, face-to-face time in the exam room. For instance, consider the waiting room. While traditionally not viewed as part of the patient-caregiver interaction, it could potentially have a negative impact on the patient experience — especially if the patient wait time is perceived to be too long or the room is not seen as being comfortable or inviting.

As workflow software continues to advance, health care organizations are gaining a better understanding of how rooms and equipment are being utilized and the amount of time patients and staff spend with specific processes. New technologies, such as RTLS, can tell health care organizations how much time a patient spent in the waiting room before being called to an examination. It can also provide visibility into the patient experience when they leave the waiting room and are taken to the exam room.

Jon Wells is responsible for driving product strategy, product development and marketing efforts within Midmark’s medical division. He is a supporter of patient accessibility standards in medical facilities and has testified regarding accessibility requirements for medical devices to the United States Access Board.

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