Healthcare leaders do not always succeed in their internal communication efforts. One Gallup poll indicated only 13% of the employees were in agreement that the organization’s leaders were communicating effectively with the rest of the team.
Many questions come to mind when looking at such data. Why is there a need for an organization’s members to communicate more effectively with each other?
It is important for leadership to understand the reasons why communication is a top priority and to align their strategies for growth in accordance with that. Gallup identifies the main reasons as to why healthcare organizations communicate internally. This helps bring forward the overall mission of the organization, helps drive daily flows of information, puts into action the requests or demands of one party by the other and lastly, it is key for decision-making and collaboration.
What technological tools can help healthcare leadership in overcoming communication barriers and drive greater efficiency across teams?
In today’s fast paced work environment, it is electronic communication, without a doubt, that comes out on top. Emails and phone communication remain quite popular ways to this day. Similarly, what drives the use of electronic communication in healthcare settings is the idea that it improves the overall quality of healthcare services. Physician usage of email and cell-phone communication (text messages, cell phone calls etc.) among colleagues or with patients remains relatively high in different parts of the world. Physicians mainly reported using emails and cell phone calls to answer patient concerns or keep up with a patient’s health condition. While these forms of communication offer value to healthcare workers, they do have certain drawbacks, such as encroachments on one’s private life and time wasted, especially with reference to email communication.
One research study published in BMC Health Services found that primary-care physicians actively used email communication (72%) and phone (70%), in terms of communicating with their patients. The fact of the matter is, that healthcare teams continue to use outdated methods to communicate such as emails, phone calls or text messages.
These tools will always play an important role in the way we communicate: the healthcare setting is a slightly more challenging workplace and the demands that come with it benefit significantly from requires communication that takes place in a single platform which connects providers, their work colleagues and patients altogether.
Key Challenges for Healthcare Organizations
For many healthcare organizations, internal communication remains a key challenge. Teams and staff members need to communicate effectively, as this drives collaboration and quality patient outcomes. At the same time, poor communication across a healthcare organization can have dire consequences, as mistakes or rather errors can be costly in terms of a patient’s well-being and even survival life. Not surprisingly then, a significant number of medical malpractices (27%) isare caused by ineffective communication.
Another challenge that remains for healthcare organizations is them continuing to use outdated communication technology. Many healthcare facilities, even today, continue to opt for outdated methods of communication such as phone calls, pagers or fax machines. While they have their value, these tools in today’s healthcare environment are inefficient, ineffective, and insufficient for professional communicationmostly do fall behind. For instance, a pager system lags behind in terms of enabling effective communication among doctors, nurses and other care providers.
While information tends to get overloaded in healthcare settings, emails are very likely to get lost. As studies indicate, the average rate for emails opened is around 39 % in the healthcare sector, which means that most important messages do not even make it to their intended target audience. This can have a very serious impact on patient care outcomes.
Modern day healthcare communication tools allow real-time flow of information, which ensures patient safety and better healthcare outcomes!
In addition to this, employee engagement in healthcare is witnessing a downward trend. Poor internal communication can lead to a disengaged workforce, that will increase turnover rates and lower the quality of patient care.
The Solution: One Platform For Better Healthcare Communication
Communication in a single setting or platform will mean less chance for miscommunication. It will concentrate the flow of information concerning patients in one place, as opposed to that information getting circulated through different mediums such as emails/text messages and eventually getting lost.
With more streamlined flows of communication, data and conversations are properly organized. This enables quicker and more efficient responses to critical emergency situations while continuously ensuring the continuity of care. Communication in healthcare needs to keep up with the pace and the challenging demands of a constantly changing workplace environment.
In such a scenario, mobile-first communication solutions can benefit medical organizations in streamlining their workflows and eliminating common errors. This will enable healthcare workers to access important information from any location. This approach will enable physicians and clinicians to access data with greater ease, be able to give timely updates to their work colleagues in other departments and overall, become more efficient in delivering services to patients.
Hucu.ai’s advanced communication app enables healthcare professionals, their work colleagues and patients to communicate more proactively in a single platform!
With Hucu.ai, employees in healthcare organizations feel that they have a voice and are heard by the management. Hucu.ai streamlines the flow of communication, in the form of different channels where multiple caregivers can interact over patients or other non-work related things (staff birthdays and much more). Hucu.ai creates space for employee feedback, team support and has lowered turnover rates among healthcare teams in the United States.
Effective internal communication among healthcare setups is key for better patient care. For this, an organization must invest in the right communication platform. Fortunately, options such as Hucu.ai , with organized means of secure communication, can help drive your healthcare team to communicate and collaborate better with each other.
Through Hucu.ai, multiple care providers can communicate within and across multiple organizations, and can bring the required health care professional within a chat in a matter of seconds.
Technology will lead the way forward and with Hucu.ai, healthcare teams can streamline their internal communication workflows. This will help leaders overcome communication barriers in their workspace. It will allow managers to stay connected with their teammates over meetings or other important things. New policies in the organization will more easily be shared and will keep every staff member updated.
It is now time for the U.S healthcare community to grow past outdated communication channels and embrace modern-day communication messaging solutions such as Hucu.ai, to drive greater efficiency among your healthcare team.
Sources
Use Internal Communications to Execute a Winning Strategy
Internal Communications in Healthcare: Challenges and Best Practices.
