Using CC&C Platforms to Transform Metrics Into Valuable Insights

Healthcare institutions are increasingly implementing clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) platforms to improve the productivity of care teams. Automated CC&C platforms perfect care orchestration plans to ensure providers have the means to satisfy the ever-changing needs of patients.

Key features of CC&C platforms include real-time, secure mobile messaging and alerting; digital, intelligent on-call schedules; time-stamped message statuses; and automated alert escalations. The synergistic interaction of these features facilitates information sharing across care teams and ensures providers have all the details required to manage a critical event.

Teams can gain valuable insights via a CC&C system’s historical and real-time incident reports. Clinical leaders can convert data, metrics and visualizations into actionable information to improve incident response performance. In this post, we’ll introduce CC&C platforms and discuss how the technology provides valuable, data-driven insights for care teams.

What Are Clinical Communication and Collaboration Platforms?

CC&C platforms replace antiquated paging systems to modernize healthcare and improve patient experience. The platforms consist of HIPAA-compliant, secure mobile applications and intelligent web management consoles. Clinicians can securely message each other on the CC&C app, and administrators can manage on-call schedules, contacts and messages via the web console.

According to Gartner, “CC&C systems offer collaborative capabilities that integrate conventional communication channels such as voice and paging with … workflow automation, IoT integration, cloud computing and advanced analytics.” CC&C platforms provide all the right capabilities and information in one user-centric location. They are designed to simplify the incident alert management process for care teams and clinical specialists.

CC&C systems played a crucial role at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The solutions accelerated emergency response and satisfied all use cases during the global crisis. For instance, nurses used CC&C apps to mobilize environmental services (EVS) to disinfect high-risk areas after hospital discharge. The communication technology continues to improve treatment activity in the ambulatory, inpatient and post-acute care settings. 

Care teams that use CC&C platforms can:

• Combine all alerts on one platform.
• Eliminate the page and phone tag cycle.
• Shorten response times with mobile alerting that gets attention.
• Reduce human errors.
• Enable HIPAA-compliant, secure text messaging.
• Share files securely across departments
• Balance the workload with on-call scheduling.
• Collaborate on care and mobilize the right incident responders.

Transforming Data Into Insights

Healthcare administrators can analyze the care team’s incident response performance through a customizable, web-based CC&C reporting dashboard. Compelling reports present the top responders, average response times, number of messages sent and more.

Administrators must find a correlation between metrics reports and actual patient outcomes. They can access CC&C reports to see what transpired after an event and determine what can be improved in the future. The objective is to use metrics to gain insight into the care team’s incident response and leverage it to introduce process improvements.

With quick access to data visualizations and summaries, clinical leaders can easily improve the effectiveness of their teams. Managers can use the insights from reporting to: 

• Examine alert distribution.
• Evaluate care team productivity.
• Prioritize work based on alert volume.
• Create incident notes to transcribe what occurred.
• Download data for further analysis.
• Improve incident response time.

Three Steps to Hack Incident Reporting

When choosing a clinical communication vendor, healthcare chief information officers (CIOs) must compare the reporting functionalities of all considered CC&C platforms. The right vendor offers reports that detail how effective the care team is at managing patient-related events.

To make the best of CC&C incident reports, healthcare provider CIOs and clinical leaders must:

1. Enable post-incident reports as soon as an event is resolved 

Remembering what transpired during an event is challenging. Leaders need to be rigorous about recording details and sharing information with colleagues.

2. Create a timeline

With reporting capabilities, leaders can see aggregate data that provides insight into the life cycle of an incident. 

3. Generate a final digital record

Leaders need to educate care team members as to why the event occurred. They can present workflow changes that will prevent the incident from happening again in the future.

Adopting an Advanced CC&C Solution

Rather than guessing how to improve workflow processes, clinical leaders can use CC&C reporting engines to be more analytical and proactive about how they manage alerts, shifts and on-call care teams. CC&C platforms allow care teams to address and resolve critical, time-sensitive patient issues effectively.