Communication technology securely connects all employees of the Asante health system in new ways

​(Source:www.healthcareitnews.com）

Asante has been trying to contact a large number of clinicians in an effective way, which may cause delays in patient care. When patients come to Asante facilities due to medical emergencies such as stroke or trauma, many providers who are critical to caring for these patients are community providers, and Asante does not have a simplified way of sending them notifications.

"Some pathways of care require immediate action by the auxiliary department; previously, contacting these support teams via phone or pager has become obsolete and has created potential obstacles," said Dr. Lee David Milligan, senior vice president and chief information officer of Asante.

Milligan explained that because of these needs, Asante hired the supplier Halo Health, which allowed clinicians and hospital staff to communicate easily, not only across teams, but also across hospitals. This capability gives employees the opportunity to discuss and coordinate patient care more seamlessly while maintaining the security required to comply with strict medical data privacy regulations.

"Halo enables Asante to send real-time unified communications to all employees, including non-clinical and community partners, to meet the needs of patients," Milligan said. "These messages comply with HIPAA standards and are auditable.

“The supplier provides modern solutions that can be used in various devices and are user-friendly,” he continued. "The flexibility within the platform allows users to collaborate with others by leveraging the technology they already have. The cloud-based structure provides reliability and accessibility that does not depend on local resources."

Currently, many Asante employees and community health organizations are using Halo. In the beginning, it was only used by providers to send basic text messages about patient care to other providers. This has evolved into the mobilization of alerts, key results and emergency assistance order notifications, and the creation of virtual connected teams.

"Clinicians can now immediately send messages to each other to get answers to questions or conduct quick consultations with patients," Milligan pointed out. "Halo provides a simplified way to communicate directly with the provider without having to wait many minutes at the answering service or the provider's office.

“Suppliers’ on-call arrangements can be integrated with existing AMiON schedules to ensure that only the appropriate on-call employees are notified based on their work schedules,” he continued. "This allows the creation of a paperless schedule in one place and reduces manual errors."

Milligan said it is easy to share images with the care team without worrying about privacy leaks involving personal devices that store PHI.

“When placing an order within Epic EHR, Asante was able to create a workflow to send urgent messages to our auxiliary department,” he said. "Haloblasts can be used to send large-scale alerts to everyone in the organization. During the recent pandemic and wildfire disasters in southern Oregon, during network infrastructure failures and Asante, the creation of incident command teams within the platform is still widely used. Able to coordinate and mobilize emergency response."

This communication tool is not only beneficial to the clinical team, but also helps the IT department to provide support and quick response time.

"If Asante encounters a downtime, senior leaders can quickly communicate with key stakeholders and convene team members to discuss and find a quick solution to the problem," Milligan said. "Clinicians can contact their Epic support team for real-time assistance."

Halo is also open to ideas for change within its platform.

"Recently, Asante requested that color coding be added to the message so that the staff can quickly determine which location is responsible for the message," Milligan explained. "This enhancement will greatly improve the efficiency of our TAC workflow, where multiple messages can be sent to many different patients in a short period of time."

Halo has agreed to send this idea to their development team for potential changes in future versions.