Many health care customers have adoptedMicrosoft Teams to implement more secure communication across the hospital while maintaining its compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. With Teams, the clinicians and other care team members have real-time communication to keep the patient moving on their care plan from admission to home care. With Teams, physicians can text with confidentiality to share information directly. Teams also helps expand communications across the entire care team.
With Teams, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, nutritionists, and anybody who might need to be part of the conversation or part of a patient’s care can be added easily. Since the entire care team receives patient communications in Teams, they can react quickly to updates and stay informed, even when they are not able to attend rounds. Teams has also helped with communication between the pharmacy and first-line clinicians. When orders needed clarification or delivery times changed, the pharmacy had issues figuring out how to find and communicate with the right person. With Teams, clinicians have clear communication paths that facilitate the relationship between the pharmacists and nurses because any issues can be cleared up right away.
Business Challenge
Health systems have a lot of communication issues: from care provider to care provider; from labs to care providers; and from care providers to patients and their families. Just like patients in hospitals everywhere, the patients and the families at the organizations have lots of questions for their doctors and nurses. They wanted to know about test results, upcoming procedures, and other parts of the care plan.
These organizations want to help their clinicians find patient information and test results quickly so that they could answer questions immediately. They wanted to have access to the information to create a better patient experience by enabling providers to promptly answer patient questions without disrupting their interaction with patients and their families. They also wanted to send alerts to doctors when their patients’ test results were ready, avoiding delays in care as clinicians react to results as soon as they become available.
Business Outcomes
Quick access: Doctors have a quick and accessible patient search tool that is imperative to efficiently treat patients.
Proactive clinical alerting: Doctors can subscribe to notifications and get timely information when patient lab results are ready.
Search and Share patient records/lab results: Doctors can utilize message extensions to search and share patient records in a channel or chat.
Customize notification: Doctors can choose what EMR data to show inTeams. Also, they can enable easy access via deep linking to entire clinical records.
Personal experience: Doctors can see all patients that are assigned to them tabs. This not only helps doctors access the right information but also gives them a conversation interface with the patients.
Solution Overview
This chat bot uses Microsoft Azure technology, with the help of FHIR Bot, patients are often able to receive answers from the care team immediately.
Clinical Inquiry Bot helps clinicians find patient information and test results on their smartphones with just a few clicks so they can answer questions immediately. Having access to the information supplied by the FHIR Bot creates a better patient experience by enabling providers to promptly answer patient questions without disrupting their interaction with patients and their families. The bot also sends alerts to doctors when their patients’ test results are ready, avoiding delays in care as clinicians react to results as soon as they become available. In addition, clinicians use FHIR Bot to push notifications for information such as lab results. These notifications remove clinicians’ stress around remembering everything that is in progress on their patients and constantly checking hospital systems for results.
