In a crowded hospital setting like Liberty Health's Jersey City Medical Center, the common forms of staff communication are text message, e-mail, intercom, or, if worse comes to worst, a shout down the hallway. Not exactly the most efficient way to gain a doctor's or nurse's attention or discuss patient information.
With the popularity of smartphones and the advent of mHealth platforms, those lines of communication are becoming much clearer and more direct. At Jersey City, for example, the 800+ doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and other staff are using a smartphone app to reach anyone they want in real time – from the hospital's CEO to a specific department to the whole system.
"It's a simple, simple thing to use, and it's been great for us," said Joseph Scott, president and CEO of Liberty Health, of the Practice Unite app, developed by Greenwich, Conn.-based Navio Health.
"We envision it as the hospital's proprietary mobile communications platform," added Stuart Hochron, practice director chief medical officer at Navio Health, which went live with Practice Unite at Jersey City roughly four months ago and is now rolling out the app for commercial use. "It kind of pulls the medical staff together."
As an example, Scott noted that when Jersey City issues a "Code Purple" – meaning the hospital is at capacity – it can use Practice Unite to immediately connect with the right departments to discharge patients and clear up space.
Hochron and Adam Turinas, Navio Health's senior director, say the Practice Unite app overshadows text message-based communication platforms because it allows for instant and encrypted communication with specific people or groups, enabling physicians to seek and respond to referrals or consults, as well as search within the network for specialists and make outpatient procedure requests. It also enables administrators and others to communicate with certain departments, they said, rather than "flood everybody's e-mail inbox."
Communication issues are particularly noticeable in networks, where a hospital and its physicians may be spread out over various locations and the physicians themselves may be in touch with several different hospitals or clinics.
"It could be a key communication component to accountable care," Scott pointed out, noting that Liberty Health is hoping to push this platform to its concierge medicine services. "And with health information exchanges looking to (gain traction), this might be that bridge."
“The increasing demands on physicians’ time, and the move away from hospital-based practice, makes it harder for physicians to find and communicate with consultants and colleagues. Hospital CEOs also tell us that they find it impossible to get the right message through to their medical staff," Hochron said in a press release issued this week. "Practice Unite solves both problems by making it easier for physicians to find and communicate with each other and by creating a more effective channel for hospital physician communication.”
Turinas said Navio Health is taking an enterprise-wide approach to implementing Practice Unite rather than tossing it out onto the market. That's because text message-based communications platforms typically generate 20 percent penetration, and he's aiming for 80 percent. With that in mind, he and Hochron said they expect to have six customers on board by the end of the year.
Hochron also noted that Practice Unite can't yet link to a system's electronic medical records, but that's next on the agenda.
"We're taking things one step at a time," he said. "We want this to basically be an open platform (and) a virtual medical staff lounge."
Scott, who's seeing rapid acceptance of Practice Unite at Jersey City – so much so that he says his competitors are asking about it as well – has another wish. He'd like to see the platform reach out to insurers, so that physicians could get authorizations more quickly, rather than waiting for hours or even days.
