Patient Experience Under-promise, Over-deliver
Have you heard of the sandwich generation? That is those people who are taking care of both their children and their parents. Jennifer and I are of this generation. We still have four of our five adopted children living under our roof, and we recently moved her parents into a home nearby so we can be available to them for all their health needs.
You have learned in earlier posts all that our children have had to endure since they were adopted to get them medically stabilized and up to grade with their education so that they may have much greater options for their future than they otherwise would have left to the government systems who were their guardians when we found them.
Now, as our parents age, we are back to the doctors, hospitals, and, more often than we would like - the emergency room (ER). Have you been to your local ER lately? They are as busy as they have ever been and with fewer resources than ever. The healthcare industry is no stranger to the phenomenon of the Great Resignation during the Pandemic. Beginning in 2020, healthcare workers have quit their jobs to the tune of 18 percent in 2021, and recent surveys indicate that 20 to as much as 50 percent of physicians and nurses say they’re ready to quit in the next year.
Even though the nursing workforce will grow from 3.1 million in 2021 to 3.3 million by 2031, an increase of 195,400 nurses, the projections are that we will still have 203,200 openings every year through the same time period. This is bad news for the ER, the hospital, the doctors' office - and us as potential patients. These shortages have already caused terrible patient experiences both in the ER and for the inpatient.
During this Fall alone, my father-in-law has had to go to the ER four times, become an inpatient for two of them, and visited numerous doctors' offices along the way. The waiting times to get in to see a doctor have been tremendous, with the last visit to the ER making him wait in the lobby for 8 hours before a treatment room opened for him and his particular condition. On top of all that, the staff are worn out and stressed (thus their desire to quit), leading to very bad attitudes, communication, and even treatment.
You may recall that my doctorate is in health administration. My doctoral research was on how healthcare could adopt internet-based technology to improve the patient experience and communication between doctor and patient way back in 2001. Not much has changed except that it is worse, and I am amazed. My career eventually took me out of health tech because other industries were adopting emerging technology much faster than healthcare.
My frustration for my parents has led me back into healthcare, assessing how we are utilizing information technology to better the experience of patients with their healthcare provider and, if not, more importantly, heightening patient outcomes. Here are some of the things that I observed could be improved based on our family's experience and those I saw with others in the waiting rooms.
None of these points occurred with two of the ER visits for my father-in-law.
Now, I completely understand that the staff are short-handed, tired, overworked, and have to endure the wrath of some very impatient people, but the leadership should be providing the team with the tools they need to make their work more effective, fulfilling, and engaging with their patients. It has been 21 years since I first made recommendations to the healthcare industry in the adoption of things like email, online calendar for scheduling appointments, beautiful and easily navigable websites, and even the use of messaging devices for each patient (called pagers) that would allow staff to keep the patient informed with their status in the waiting room.
It amazes me that we still have not fully adopted such advanced tech as these were then when today we have mobile phones that are way more powerful than anything we had at the turn of the century. From 2009 to 2011, I was part of a team that developed and deployed a patient tracking app that allowed the EM technician (EMT) in the field to directly communicate with the ER in real-time as they shared the vital signs and other triage data the medical team would need to prepare for that patient's arrival. I even developed an app that would allow people observing a 911 incident to live stream video from the scene to first responders so they could "see" what was happening at the scene before they arrived. That was in 2012.
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Why haven't these types of apps been fully adopted by healthcare and emergency management to make patient care management safer, more effective, and less resource intensive?
As I thought about what I would like to see in an application that would be beneficial for the care of my father and father-in-law, I started to search around to see what was already on the market but not yet fully adopted by ERs across the country. I found them, but not all are the same, and most of those in use are very cumbersome for both the staff and the patients to use and understand. Except for one!
Disclaimer: I currently have no affiliation with this company, so this is not a paid ad.
Many of you may be using an application called Mint that is owned by Intuit and is the #1 personal financial management app downloaded from the Apple and Google Play stores. It was developed by an entrepreneur named Aaron Patzer , who built the company to be a great success and sold it to Intuit in 2009. He had a second success with Fountain.com, which he sold in 2013. Aaron joined up with an Emory Healthcare ER physician named Justin Schrager to develop an app specifically to address many of the problems I have found with my family's ER visits. It is called ERAdvisor, and you can find all the details here.
First, it is a beautiful app designed to be a great patient and staff experience. It helps its customers "reduce uncertainty and overcome operational obstacles and bottlenecks." It has proven to increase patient satisfaction with relevant and timely updates freeing up caregiver time while optimizing clinical resources so that the right person is helping the right patient at the right time. It even uses artificial intelligence (AI) to save clinical time and serve patients with appropriately routed alerts and messaging between the clinical team, the patient, and the patient's family.
ERAdvisor has been on the market for a few years with great success. As they gained experience and understanding of the communication needs of the ER, they realized and were encouraged by current clients to develop a similar application for the inpatient hospital teams and patients. That app was launched this summer as CareAdvisor.
If you are a healthcare professional and you see the opportunity that your ER or inpatient facility could use these apps, or you are a patient or family member realizing that your local hospital needs to be using these tremendous tools, reach out Nate Fletcher as he drives sales for the company. I have already introduced ERAdvisor to our local ER, so we can hopefully have them adopt it soon into 2023. My family would certainly appreciate using it on our next visit to the ER or hospital. Our parents are not getting younger and the staff at the hospital is not getting the rest and resources they need to be more satisfied and change their minds about quitting or retiring early. We all need help!
With the shortages that are already enforce today and that will be getting worse over the coming years, we need to find new technologies to adopt, change how we operate clinically, and serve our patients with the utmost empathy. I believe ERAdvisor and CareAdvisor are good tools for the job.
When you want to speak with me about your ideas or needs, reach out via?LinkedIn?or through our mobile community app,?GordonJones.org
Have a great weekend, Gordon
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