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By Mark Henricks
If you’re a healthcare CIO pondering information technology funding decisions, a new study suggests you buttonhole a few of your physicians to ask some questions. Better yet, try dialing their cellphones. Whether or not they answer, or even return your message in a timely manner, may give you some critical guidance about how to help your most important healthcare delivery professionals communicate with each other.
That’s the message inside a recent study of physicians and smartphones by healthcare IT advisory Spyglass Consulting. Surveyors conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with physicians working nationwide in acute care and ambulatory environments during spring 2010. They found that physicians are rapidly picking up smartphones and that far more of them use smartphones than the rest of the U.S. -- and yet they still were having trouble communicating with each other.
The most startling number in the report is 78 percent. That’s the percentage of physicians who said reaching colleagues to perform vital functions such as handing off patient data was slower and harder than it should be. The causes are not all IT-related. The report pointed a finger at the U.S.’s fee-for-service reimbursement system, saying that encourages healthcare professionals to focus on seeing more patients and performing more treatments instead of doing a better job of promoting improved outcomes. That problem probably lies outside the purview of most healthcare CIOs.
But there’s something going on with technology as well. The report said 94 percent of physicians were using smartphones to communicate, access medical information and manage personal and business schedules. That was up from 59 percent in a similar study in 2006. “Physician smartphone adoption is occurring more rapidly than with members of the general public,” observed Gregg Malkary, managing director of Spyglass. Malkary said iPhones were trouncing Blackberry products, with 44 percent of docs choosing Apple over 25 percent for RIM.
So with all these high-powered smartphones in lab coat pockets, and assuming the wearers of those coats aren’t unduly disincentivized to take a moment from seeing patients to talk to each other, why can’t they easily ring up a colleague to pass on critical patient data? One reason may be that cellphones typically don’t work very well in hospital buildings. Thus many doctors, even those toting the latest iPhone, continue to rely on pagers. And again, that’s a problem that CIOs can’t necessarily solve on their own.
They may be able to help with one critical need, however. That is for automated solutions to help physicians manage the volume of voice mail, pager messages, text messages and e-mail they send and receive. Without coordinated IT support and message management tools, they have to manually check separate pager, phone and computer inboxes and filter and prioritize messages by hand, Spyglass noted. The fact that most healthcare IT departments don’t support iPhones means that doctors who go to them for help are likely to be told to buy a Blackberry -- which they have already chosen not to do.
If any of this suggests an initiative the board of directors might be willing to fund, a CIO can probably count on some support from the docs. Spyglass said 56 percent of physicians interviewed were concerned about lack of standardized processes for transitioning care between colleagues. The company cited the fact that informal, ad hoc patient handoff processes were likely to introduce medical errors. That doesn’t sound like something a lot of healthcare entities will take lightly.
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