Patient Care Team Communication and Collaboration

Michael Ripchinski, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer, Lancaster General Health, and Hemang Patel, Healthcare Business Development Manager, Microsoft Corporation. To address the challenges of slow, asynchronous communication in healthcare today, Lancaster General Health developed creative solutions in the hospital inpatient setting. The future of Medical Staff communications is aimed at reducing length of stay, improving response time to patients, reducing readmissions, and improving patient and provider satisfaction. Through LEAN process changes, LG Health was able to demonstrate a model to improve physician-nurse communication, improve consultant-attending communication, and decrease the length of stay index. Dr. Ripchinski and Hemang review these approaches integrated with an electronic health record and the resulting benefits from those process changes.