Our staff polled clinicians on today’s most innovative care team communications solutions to determine which product/service line yields the most effective results from their day-to-day use. We asked about alert integration, secure messaging, cross platform support, enterprise-wide directories, ease of use, analytics and reporting tools and cost. We surveyed 19 separate solutions. Below are the top 10 HIT Leaders for 2018.

1.  @Telmediq
2.  @DocHaloApp
3.  @VoceraComm
4.  @PatientSafeSoln
5.  @spoktweets
6.  @Imprivata
7.  @TigerConnect
8. 
9.  @PerfectServe
10.  @Cerner

Contrary to popular opinion, healthcare is not the only industry that took the misguided “ready, fire, aim” approach to incorporating technology into their workflows and business processes.

It was not long ago when finance, utilities, retail, and education were extremely awkward (to put it nicely) in their utilization of emerging IT. It took years of missteps and countless conversations amongst a host of stakeholders before leaders could get their bearings and create the technology-integration strategies that are now second nature within their given fields. Without openly sharing their successes and mistakes, and actively gathering as many perspectives as possible, our banks, stores, and schools would still be marred within the “paralysis by analysis” phase of adoption where many feel healthcare is still trapped.

I’ve spent the past several months covering a variety of healthcare conferences and executive forums where I have heard many IT integration discussions that are similar in nature to those previously conducted in other industries. These presentations and meetings examined a wide range of historically persistent concerns, but I left each event feeling a new sense of optimism that I see growing within our industry as a whole.

At the heart of this positive change is a renewed emphasis on collaboration within our field. When healthcare providers are able to leverage more technology within their workflows, they share their positive results with their colleagues. When vendors are able to develop new equipment and applications, they influence the marketplace’s direction as well as future iterations of today’s solutions. This constant exchange of ideas is vital for the development of new healthcare IT practices. Without it, we cannot see beyond our own foxhole and effectively attack industry-wide issues.

Spok today announced that it was selected by Union Hospital, in Maryland, to implement the latest version of its Spok Care Connect enterprise communications solutions. Used in both the contact center and in clinical areas, the software platform is designed to evolve with the organization’s changing needs.

Union Hospital is an award-winning, full-service community hospital located in Elkton, Md., that has been serving the residents of Cecil County and the neighboring communities in Delaware and southern Pennsylvania for more than 100 years. The 122-bed, not-for-profit organization is nationally recognized for clinical excellence and offers outpatient, surgical and emergency services, as well as comprehensive health education programs. The project began with requests from the nursing team to find a way to receive telemetry monitor alarms on their phones to speed response. From there, the Union County team identified additional ways to improve their clinical communication processes.

“Input from Spok’s team was very valuable. We started thinking about bed alarms, phone calls, the routing of critical labs and alerts—all kinds of uses started to emerge,” said Anne Lara, chief information officer for Union Hospital. “I was impressed by the thoroughness of the engagement and the real-world knowledge of the Spok consultants. Their recommendations were also in line with our goal to make sure Union Hospital’s IT infrastructure is sustainable, upgradeable, and maintainable.”

While documented resources will always account for a significant part of the information flow in healthcare, growing evidence indicates that information requests by clinicians will be met more often by their colleagues via mobile synchronous and asynchronous communications. 

As part of our “Countdown to HIMSS’16” series, we spoke with Jason Stanaland, Mobility Solutions Consultant, Spok (HIMSS’16 booth #4829). He described Spok’s approach to establishing effective clinical communication systems and how the company’s experience across multiple vertical markets provides special insights that are particularly important in healthcare.

Some of the subjects we discussed included:

• the historical and contemporary challenges surrounding clinical communications;
• the need to secure communications for both the organization and the end user;
• how communication gaps between patients/consumers and providers/marketplace are eroding;
• the potential of Big Data’s impacts on the future of clinical communications.

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

After attending yesterday’s closing presentation at VUE15, where Voalte’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer Trey Lauderdale unveiled three new clinical communications solutions that his company will launch in 2016 (we will publish a rundown of each solution on November 16), I had the opportunity to speak with Michael Blum, MD, Director, Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI) at University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). I was given this exclusive interview as a means of learning more about the origins and the goals of one of the new offerings announced at the conference, Voalte Story, a co-development venture between Voalte and CDHI that provides an interactive patient wall similar in nature to Facebook that clinicians may access to post and link texts or alarms to a specific patient. 

(Editor’s note: To hear audio excerpts of this interview, click on the media player buttons that run throughout this article.)

Free: Please describe the history of CDHI, as well as your role within the organization today.

Blum: I’m the Director of CDHI. I’m also the Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Medical Information Officer at UCSF.

When we came out of our enterprise data and electronic health record (EHR) implementation at UCSF, it became more obvious that there were many next-generation issues and opportunities that we needed to tackle in order to leverage our evolving technologies to generate the best ideas and practices that we need for our work. We knew that we had to really get out and engage with our patients and consumers in a much deeper way, requiring us to make moves far beyond the EHR. 

While EHR is critically important to running a complex center today, that with the changes that are going on in healthcare from healthcare reform and a move toward precision medicine, we were going to need much more than electronic data warehousing.

We also understood that the digital technologies and consumer engagement were driving very rapidly towards a different, much more consumer, ambulatory look at healthcare. There were new data sources that we were going to need to consider as we went forward like patient-generated data, device-generated data, genomic data, other omic data, and we needed ways to think about those streams of information. That lead to the creation of CDHI. 

Spok, Inc. announced that it will share the latest enhancements to its suite of clinical communications solutions, including critical test results management (CTRM), secure texting and mobile communications support in Chicago this week at the HIMSS 15 Annual Conference & Exhibition. More than 25 Spok team members are in attendance to speak with clinicians, IT professionals and hospital administrators about the enhancements to the Spok Care Connect solution suite, which is designed to fully integrate hospital communication workflows and support better patient care.

The most anticipated development is related to integration of Spok’s CTRM solution with the hospital’s centralized directory. Used by hospitals in the lab, radiology, cardiopulmonary and other diagnostic departments, CTRM reduces unnecessary time from the test result notification process by directly alerting ordering providers of available results. The enhanced two-way communication capability between CTRM and directory allows providers to easily respond to messages about results with questions for more detail or follow-up information. Additional new functionality lets CTRM pull information directly from the consolidated staff directory’s on-call schedules. This enables the system to automatically escalate critical result notifications to on-call providers if the ordering physician does not acknowledge an alert in a timely manner.