Imagine stepping into Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic sits on stage with each member of the orchestra wearing a blindfold and earplugs. The conductor stumbles onto the podium, also with eyes and ears covered, and begins waving their arms. Without the visual and audio connection between the conductor and the musicians, the NY Philharmonic is unable to perform the beautiful harmonious music that it’s known to produce.
Much like a symphonic orchestra, healthcare operations require an established connection between siloed systems; e.g. Electronic Health Records (EHRs), nursing call, patient monitoring systems, scheduling systems, and other technology platforms, to produce a harmonious digital symphony where healthcare clinicians can deliver timely, accurate, and compassionate patient care.
Hypercare has built integrations with various other technology platforms. This is done through Hypercare and third-party APIs, or other integration options such as flat file transfers. There are multiple nuances and factors, such as the third-party API quality, time-to-build, and stability of integration, to consider when choosing which avenue of integration to take. Each integration built to date has been upon customer request, which ensures its function aligns closely with their needs.
Alarms for critical notifications, such as code team activations or patient monitors, are usually blaring to ensure that the intended responders are notified. However, these alerts can be indiscriminate and disturb a whole audience for whom these notifications are irrelevant. This leads to alarm fatigue as clinicians start to ignore them, and patients are constantly exposed to excess noise.
To address this issue, Hypercare has built integrations with platforms such as Connexall and other patient monitoring systems to improve the specificity of notification delivery. Through these integrations, clinicians are able to activate code teams that trigger specific clinicians based on coverage and on-call; and patient monitors send alerts directly to the nurse assigned to the patient.
On the flip side, critical communication can be missed due to unreliable delivery of notifications. We saw this challenge with a current client relaying EKGs from the field with Zoll and Lifenet. Zoll would capture the EKG and send it via the Lifenet System and email. Given that most providers aren’t consistently at a computer or checking their email while at the hospital, these EKGs were being missed.
Hypercare has integrations with both Zoll and Lifenet to deliver EKGs directly onto relevant on-call physicians’ mobile devices in real-time, with extra features to bypass do-not-disturb and silent modes to ensure that the notification is heard and seen. This is most important in detecting and triaging potential STEMI to improve the accuracy of diagnosis and shorten the time it takes to gather the cath lab team, improving first medical contact to balloon times and ultimately patient outcomes.
As the keyholders to hospital information libraries such as on-call schedules and office locations, clinicians often rely on switchboard operators to access key pieces of information to get connected with colleagues or other parties.
Why? Simply put – clinicians are busy. It’s cumbersome to sit down at a computer, access the hospital intranet, and then navigate to 1 of 15 links that could be the on-call schedule or directory when you have a list of 20 patients to see.
As such, Hypercare integrates with various scheduling systems to create a single source of truth through which all on-call schedules can be accessed with ease and accuracy. Additionally, Hypercare integrates with the hospital's active directory and can sync to display comprehensive information such as employee office location, extension number, emergency contact, and more, directly in the user’s Hypercare profile. Each of these fields is customizable by the organization to fit all its unique needs.
The direction of Hypercare has always been charted by the needs of our customers, and the integrations we build are no different. Future directions include more in-depth integrations with electronic health records (eg., Epic, Meditech, and Cerner) to find workflows that would benefit from accessing specific patient data from patient charts. There are also benefits in integrating with telephony systems such as Cisco, Mitel, and Avaya, to allow users to route calls directly within the Hypercare platform.
Interoperability is paramount to creating a seamless digital healthcare system that supports optimized provider workflow.
Interested in learning more about Hypercare’s integration capabilities? Schedule a demo.
Hypercare is a care coordination platform that ensures the most critical notifications get delivered instantly and securely, with built-in escalations and fall-back mechanisms. Book your free demo now.
