Interprofessional Communication Tool
Overall clinical communication is complex and failures in communication are a significant cause of preventable adverse events. The issues include inefficient patient hand-over, inability to triage the urgency of messages leading to paging disruption, not being able to identify the most responsible physician, and lack of coordination across disciplines leading to delays in care. Poor communication impacts day to day operations and in light of the aging population, rising healthcare costs, and budgetary pressures, more effective communication processes are urgently needed.
The goal of the interprofessional communication tool (IP tool) will be to foster team communication and address the many inefficient communication processes within an integrated solution. It will allow nurses, allied health staff, and pharmacists to send communication to the medical teams in a non disruptive fashion and queue messages to ensure all issues are addressed. It will have functions to separate urgent vs. non-urgent tasks to reduce disruption to the medical teams but have prompting mechanisms to ensure the non-urgent tasks are still addressed. There will be features built into the solution to allow physicians to manage their availability and ensure communication is routed to a covering physician when they are away. There will also be a simple handheld application that will allow clinicians to interact with the tool for key functions such as checking and responding to messages.
Issues with clinical communication exist in every healthcare organization so the intention is to develop a platform that can be adopted by any organization in an effort to achieve global system impact. This project will leverage the work and capabilities enabled by the BlackBerry Program and foster the collaboration between the University Health Network (UHN) and Mt. Sinai Hospital (MSH).