Becker's Hospital Review

30 Executive Briefing home and receive treatment there. This specific instance caused frustration for the health system. Case study authors concluded that the time spent on the situation could have been used to respond to other urgent cases. The situation also resulted in the wasteful use of valuable personal protective equipment and potential exposure to multiple providers. After implementing Pulsara, the health system immediately realized a reduction in avoidable exposures and consumption of PPE. With the telehealth platform, clinicians are now able to use live video to remotely assess patients and communicate with other providers. All providers at the health system are now connected on a single patient channel, allowing clinicians to triage patients to the necessary care option via virtual communication to limit clinician and community exposure. Pulsara also helps streamline other emergency care, which further limits provider exposures throughout the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Woodson said. When treating a stroke patient, for example, many different people across various organizations must come together to collectively serve the patient. Previously, when a patient presents with stroke-like symptoms and has a fever, EMS typically alerts the hospital, which then mobilizes its radiology team and ensures the patient can be transported directly to the CT scanner. With Pulsara, EMS can send a multimedia, telemedicine-based report instead of traditional radio to alert the downstream care team members such as the radiologist, radiology technicians, emergency department, neurologist and responding stroke team. But, with the fever and other COVID-19 symptoms, everything gets more complicated. "They can all be activated and alerted that this is an inbound patient with suspected stroke who may even have COVID-19," Dr. Woodson said. "A neurologist, even before COVID-19, had to make an average of 17 phone calls to coordinate care around this stroke patient. Now they're able to leverage a tool like Pulsara that's designed to unite teams across organizations and truly simplify care and decrease these treatment times." Boost stroke care team coordination times CHRISTUS Good Shepherd Medical Center in Longview, Texas, has experienced the benefit that a streamlined communication process can have on stroke care. The hospital, which responds to an average of 60 time-sensitive stroke cases per month, implemented Pulsara's mobile communication platform in 2013 to improve door-to- needle times. Before deploying Pulsara, CHRISTUS Good Shepherd Medical Center's EMS, ED, nursing, CT, and neurology departments used multiple communication channels, often resulting in missing information and miscommunication during time-sensitive emergencies. Further, staff struggled with a lack of team coordination and found themselves out of sync when providing stroke care. "One challenge we found was that everybody providing care was looking at their own clocks, which weren't necessarily in sync," said Jennifer Reeves, RN, Stroke Program Coordinator at CHRISTUS. "I may be looking at the time on my watch and the charge nurse could be looking at the one on the computer." After replacing legacy communication tools such as pagers and phone calls, CHRISTUS providers tapped into a centralized, mobile app that housed all critical patient information needed to coordinate stroke care. With Pulsara's solution, the entire care team began to communicate on a single patient channel that provided real-time video and audio calling, alerts, a universal clock, vital signs, and other multimedia to help streamline care team communications. In 2019, the CHRISTUS Health System and its EMS partners successfully treated 472 stroke cases while using Pulsara. CHRISTUS discovered when EMS used Pulsara, the stroke team was activated an average of eight minutes before patient arrival versus 12 minutes after the patient arrived when Pulsara was not used. The collaboration between EMS and the hospital also led to a 59 percent decrease in door-to-needle time for patients receiving tPA. Later that year, in recognition of the strides made to improve care for time-sensitive stroke cases, the American Stroke Association honored CHRISTUS Good Shepherd with the Target Stroke Elite Plus Quality Achievement Award. Read the full case study here: https://www. pulsara.com/Beckers-CHRISTUS Telemedicine is the future Pre-COVID-19, the future of telemedicine was complicated and riddled with varying regulatory and reimbursement requirements that served as barriers to widespread usage. But if there's one silver lining to this pandemic, it has been the growth of telemedicine and alignment of incentives to allow it to truly take off, Dr. Woodson said. "We knew there would eventually be a decentralization as well as a consumerization of healthcare, we just didn't know that it would happen overnight like this," he said. n Inspired by the communication crisis in healthcare, Pulsara provides a real-time communication network across entire regions. Built with the power of mobile technology, Pulsara unites the right clinicians at the right time for the right patient — providing transparency and streamlined communication when time is essential. Just CREATE a dedicated patient channel. BUILD your custom team. And COMMUNICATE. Simple.

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