4 Steps to Deliver Real-Time Health Data at the Point of Care

Earlier this year at the HIMSS 2024 conference, Rob Wonnacott, R.N., manager of Michigan Medicine’s nursing information systems department, described a difficult challenge his organization faced.

The problem? Paper strips — the kind that a clinician prints out from a heart monitor or other device, annotated with dates, time stamps and initials, and then physically delivered to another clinician to read, interpret, make a medical decision and instruct the first clinician on what to do.

The inefficient paper strip workflow was endemic of two broader challenges impacting the university-based health system: how to get raw data into the hands of physicians instantly and how to provide them with the data from many patients in multiple locations.

Getting to a More Advanced State of Care

Michigan Medicine is hardly alone in confronting this challenge. Scores of organizations are reconnecting, rewiring, reshaping and rethinking how they can deliver actionable, real-time data to clinicians at the point of care to improve clinical and business outcomes.

A new AHA Market Scan Trailblazers report, “Delivering Actionable Data to Clinicians at the Point of Care,” examines these issues and provides a road map for organizations to follow as they strive to boost clinical, business and operational performance.

For Michigan Medicine, the solution was a cloud-based technology platform that enables clinicians to access real-time data on any patient from anywhere on any connected HIPAA-compliant device.

The organization first connected its intensive care units (ICUs), emergency departments and telemetry beds to the platform without changing any workflows. Six months later, the system eliminated the paper strips, which Wonnacott estimated at as many as 400 per day. The move generated hard savings from the elimination of paper and ink costs, the expense of printer maintenance and time spent scanning strips into patient electronic health records (EHRs). More importantly, it eliminated wasted time that now is focused on direct patient care.

4 Takeaways on How to Provide Real-Time Data to Clinicians

1 | Explore the technology.

Delivering actionable data to clinicians at the point of care in real time is a buzzy statement. But what does it mean in terms of technology and functionality? It means feeding into and displaying all relevant data clinicians need to assess and treat a patient on a single, customizable dashboard.

This includes core vital signs along with metrics from other devices and lines connected to an individual patient. The on-demand dashboard also pulls in EHR data, clinical notes and diagnostic test results.

Takeaway

Because all data reside securely in a web-based platform, clinicians can access the single dashboard on a bedside display, a tablet or a smartphone. Users can access all the data on any device for one patient in one location, multiple patients in one location or multiple patients in multiple locations — all 24/7.

2 | Make a list of use cases.

Explore a broad cross section of opportunities, such as these examples. Conduct retrospective quality assurance reviews with continuous and complete data sets. Monitor patients simultaneously while doing clinical documentation using a split screen. Remotely monitor patients during cardiovascular physical therapy sessions. Partner with revenue cycle staff to provide data in support of claim delays, denials and appeals.

Takeaway

Think big here. The only limit on use cases is an organization’s imagination for what can be done with the data.

3 | Expect barriers to adoption.

Hospitals and health systems that want to provide actionable, real-time data at the point of care to their clinicians will face barriers to adoption before the project begins and after the go-live phase.

Staff may see it as a point solution to solve one problem in one unit rather than an enterprise-wide opportunity to dramatically change care delivery. Organizations may not have an effective process to roll out a solution across the enterprise. From a technology standpoint, hospitals and health systems may not have easily integrated interoperable systems that can feed into one platform. Others who have been burned by prior technology installations may be skeptical of this approach and the ability to scale it across the organization.

Takeaway

Anticipating these before-and-after barriers enables advocates for change to develop plans to overcome each barrier before it threatens to trip up adoption.

4 | Measure your success.

Given the many barriers to adoption, it will be important to identify, track and report key performance indicators (KPIs) after the technology goes live. KPIs can fall into many categories such as administrative (e.g., claim denial rate, clinician turnover rate, patient satisfaction scores); clinical (e.g., health care-associated infections, mortality rates and readmission rates); financial (e.g., full-time equivalents, lengths of stay in the ICU and overall lengths of stay); and operational (e.g., patient throughput, ventilator days, etc.).

Takeaway

The return on investment promises to be substantial based on the right KPIs. The most important KPIs will track patients’ clinical outcomes and productive work environments and workflows for clinicians.