Entries tagged with clinicians - Channel 10

Extending and coordinating care with Unified Communication: The next wave is here

bcrounse — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:43:00 GMT

Ten years ago I co-founded a company with the aim to provide web-based medical information, secure messaging and virtual visits between patients and their personal physicians. Working in partnership with Microsoft we developed technology that was well ahead of its time, and also well ahead of the market's ability to absorb it. Quite honestly, the technology was also a bit too complex, too expensive, and too hard to use. But that was then.

Roll forward ten years. The technology has matured. Governments and payors around the world are looking for ways to provide health information and medical services more efficiently. Shortages and mal-distributions of qualified medical professionals, aging populations, and the increasing burden of chronic disease are creating a perfect storm in healthcare. A medical model that is solely dependent on physicians providing care to patients one-on-one, in city center clinics or hospitals, doesn't scale anymore and certainly isn't sustainable.

Earlier this year I posted a Blog on Unified Communications: The Next Big Thing in Healthcare. If you didn't read it then, please read it now to become better grounded on what I'm about to share.

Envision a world where modalities for both synchronous and asynchronous communication begin to merge on the desktop, or even on your Smartphone. Imagine being able to schedule a virtual consultation with a colleague or colleagues as easily as you schedule an appointment in Outlook today.

Picture yourself using rich audio and video to enhance the communication and collaboration. Think about how you could share applications on your desktop, work together on documents, or extend presentations in a lecture hall to hundreds or thousands of your colleagues wherever they might be.

What about patients? Depending on your specialty this may be more or less relevant. However, I don't think there is a clinician out there who wouldn't benefit from incorporating Unified Communications into their practice work-flow. UC opens up amazing possibilities for virtual visits, follow-up visits, medication checks, home care, wound checks, chronic disease management, mental health, nurse call centers, patient education, and more. As governments and other payors around the world begin to understand the economics and value proposition of extending care with this now-commoditzed technology, healthcare services will go through a remarkable transformation.

With Microsoft Unified Communications, and the newest versions of Microsoft Office, Office Communicator and Office Live Meeting, all of this is not only possible; it is easy, intuitive and downright spectacular.

Use it as a hosted service or bring it into your enterprise. Do live interactive programs or record them for on-demand viewing later. There isn't a medical school, hospital, clinic, or physician's office that couldn't benefit from the mind-bending possibilities this technology unleashes. Get ready for a new day in healthcare.

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

Unified Communications: The Next BIG Thing in Healthcare

bcrounse — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:23:00 GMT

In previous Blog entries and on my House Calls audio-cast series, I’ve highlighted healthcare customers who are doing some outstanding work using Microsoft and Microsoft partner solutions to build portals that make key performance indicators, quality standards, and price standards more transparent. These same solutions are being used to automate clinical and business work-flow processes, manage documents, and generally improve collaboration across the enterprise. Today, I want to focus on what I see as the next really big opportunity in healthcare; Unified Communication.

Healthcare is a communication intensive business. Good communication has a profound effect on the quality and safety of patient care. Communication also has a huge bearing on patient satisfaction. Yet historically, the options for how we communicate with each other in the healthcare industry have been somewhat limited. We are hampered by an industry that has far too long relied on old fashioned telephone, paging, fax, and mail (both postal and interoffice); not exactly the most contemporary communication infrastructure.

Today’s progressive businesses use a wide variety of tools and technologies to facilitate communication. Communication can be synchronous or asynchronous depending on the urgency or context of the message. Information can be relayed and exchanged by instant message, e-mail, telephone (including voice over IP), audio conferencing, or video conferencing. In addition, the concept of “presence” in communication technologies now allows us to know ahead of time if someone is available to receive a message or take a call. It also lets us set up rules on how, when, where, and on what devices we want to be contacted.

So let’s extend all that into the typical healthcare setting. No longer am I restricted to the telephone for communicating with colleagues or patients. Depending on the nature of the message, where I am and what I’m doing, I can decide to use either a synchronous or asynchronous mode of communication. No more waiting on hold or playing phone tag on the telephone. Furthermore, as communication technology converges to the computer and is increasingly facilitated by the Net, my choice of device is no longer restricted either. My office telephone, Smartphone, Pocket-PC, laptop, Tablet-PC or desktop PC will all be able to do the job for me whether it’s an instant message, e-mail, voice, or video communication that is required. This technology will also have a profound effect on the way we conduct meetings and do training in the future. The use of multi-media web conferencing and interactive e-learning technologies will absolutely explode in healthcare as we increasingly communicate electronically in the office and at home for grand rounds presentations, staff training, patient education, and more. Finally, advances in speech recognition and the incorporation of speech recognition technology into unified communications, will open up new vistas for securely accessing patient information and relaying clinical orders.

I’m not going to spill the beans on everything that is yet to come. But if you work in healthcare, or you are an industry vendor building communication and collaboration solutions for the healthcare industry, the future is blazingly bright.

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft

Doctors write their own prescription for healthcare IT

bcrounse — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 20:24:00 GMT

This past week I've come across two examples of why I believe we are finally at a tipping point in healthcare IT solutions; solutions that are meeting the expectations and work-flow requirements of clinicians. Both solutions were designed by clinicians for clinicians rather than by computer science engineers. That likely explains their success in delighting the clinicians who use them.

One of these solutions I've written about before on this Blog. It's the solution known as Azyxxi; a technology acquired by Microsoft about 9 months ago from MedStar Health in Washington, D.C. and currently in use across MedStar's seven-hospital system. We are now in talks with a number of customers who want to be early adopters of this technology. Earlier in the week, I accompanied our Azyxxi team for executive discussions with a few of those customers in Arizona and California. All I can say is that most everyone we talk with totally "gets" the clinical and business value proposition of Azyxxi and why this system delights clinicians and provides insight to information as never before. Stay tuned for more announcements about Azyxxi in coming months.

The other solution that warrants mention, just like Azyxxi, was born to address clinical work-flow requirements in a large academic teaching facility that weren't being met by the facility's existing vendor solutions. Doctors and residents at UCLA Medical Center were frustrated by not having adequate tools to access needed information and document their findings during patient rounding and for patient hand-offs at shift change. Once again, it was the doctors themselves using readily available commodity software that came up with the solution to address their own work-flow pains. Dr. Neil Martin, chief of neurosurgery at UCLA who I had the opportunity to chat with at HIMSS in New Orleans a few weeks ago, tells the story best in some recent correspondence with me. He writes;

Rounding and progress note generation is a time-consuming everyday requirement for any physician managing inpatients. It involves "hunting and gathering" the clinical data required for daily patient assessment (lab results, vital signs, test results, etc), making a rounding list with key information, finding all the patients, examining each patient and analyzing all the data, generating a daily plan, and writing a daily progress note. Much of the work for rounding involves low-cognitive-value clerical-level data retrieval, and transcription onto the rounding list and into the progress note. This is particularly time-consuming and onerous at tertiary academic medical centers (AMCs) with a large high-acuity patient population. Traditionally the clerical aspects of rounding and note generation have been done at AMCs by interns and residents - but with new mandatory resident work-hour limitations, the time available for this sort of clerical work has disappeared.

At UCLA Medical Center, we have designed and deployed a software application that automates rounding list generation, and provides a templated daily progress note partially auto-completed with data (labs, vitals, etc). The automated list/note application saves interns and residents 45-90 minutes per day for each clinical team. When the time-savings associated with this application became apparent to the interns and residents, its use expanded from 100 users to more than 1200 in less than a year, with very little in the way of formal announcement or training - the spread was by word-of-mouth and was virtually "viral". More than 25 clinical service teams now use this application for rounding daily. Interns, residents, and many attending staff physicians now use and depend on this application. A modified rounding application has also been developed for ward charge nurses - and this is currently in a pilot phase. A conservative estimate is that this application at UCLA saves more than 7300 hours of clinician time annually, with a value of approximately $ 365,000/year. In this presentation we will describe the application, discuss its development, and examine its current real-world clinical utilization at an academic medical center.

Dr. Martin will be a featured speaker at the HIMSS Summit in San Diego in June. If you want to learn more about the good work of Dr. Martin and his colleagues at UCLA, be sure to attend his session.

It is thrilling to be involved in an industry with so much potential to improve the quality and safety of patient care, and the satisfaction of those receiving and giving that care. It is also thrilling to see so many of my clinician colleagues using their deep clinical experience and healthcare industry knowledge to drive innovative new solutions to market.

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

New Audiocast: Asklepios--Hospital of the Future

bcrounse — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 20:40:00 GMT

As I've traveled the world, I've come to appreciate the fact that some of the most innovative work in healthcare information technology is happening outside of the Unitied States. One such example is the Asklepios Hospital near Hamburg, Germany. In this month's edition of my audiocast series, "House Calls for Healthcare Professionals" we visit with an administrator and a clinician at the Asklepios Hospital to find out more about what they've done and why the hospital has been designated a "hospital of the future". We also hear from representatives of Microsoft and Intel who partnered wth Asklepios in the design of their contemporary healthcare IT infrastructure and applications. I hope you enjoy the show.

Bill Crounse, MD Healthcare Industry Director Microsoft Corporation

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Asklepios hospital in Germany: Hospital of the future
This program is also available in MP3 for download.

In February 2005, the Asklepios Group, a privately held clinic and hospital system operating in Germany, opened a brand new facility: the Asklepios Hospital Barmbek in Hamburg. The new hospital combines architectural, organizational and information technology-related innovations. It’s been called a reference center for a "hospital of the future." Hospital executives say the new facility is based on the tradition of the past and the medicine of the future. The Asklepious Future Hospital initiative was initiated by the Asklepios Group in cooperation with Microsoft and Intel.

Panel guests:

Dr. Tobias Kaltenbach, CEO, Asklepios Clinics, is responsible for the company's operative business units in West Germany, including information technology (IT) and facility management. He received his degree in engineering management from the University of Hamburg and his doctorate in management from the University of Cologne with a thesis on "quality management in hospitals."

Dr. Siegbert Faiss, Chief Physician, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Asklepios Klinik Barmbek, has also worked as Senior Physician and Consultant at the Department of Gastroenterology at the University Hospital Benjamin Franklin in Berlin. Dr. Faiss received his degree in medicine from the University of Ulm in Donau, Germany.

Sharad Gandhi, Director, Digital Health Group - Intel EMEA, is responsible for strategy, business, sales and marketing for Intel’s success in Health care. He holds graduate degrees in Physics from Bombay University and in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Neil Jordan, Senior Director, Microsoft Worldwide Health Industry, is responsible for formulating and executing on Microsoft’s worldwide strategy for delivering value across the healthcare provider institutions in the global health market, from the latest high-tech urban hospitals to rural clinics in developing countries.

Additional resources: downloads

Grand Opening Announcement (76.3 KB Word file)
"Hospital of the Future" Showroom (5.85 MB Portable Document file)
Asklepios intern newsletter – Barmbek Special (2.66 MB Portable Document file)
eHealth Interoperability Platform brochure (2.41 MB Portable Document file)