Mobile Telemedicine provides countless benefits not only to patients yet to both first responders and medical facilities. It maximizes time, saves money and shrinks margin for error; with an average patient cost decrease by 8%. Mobile Telemedicine provides clear protocols for first responders to initiate and for emergency departments to expound on. It smooths out the wrinkles from stretcher to ambulance to the hospital bed. Everyone from EMS to ED nurses to surgeons feel its benefits. With a 36% increase in operational efficiency and 28% increase in nurse and physician productivity. Those are some hard-to-ignore numbers.
Mobile Telemedicine is more than just numbers. It’s expedited care for the patient and peace of mind for the caregiver.
To gain feedback from a piece of the emergency care puzzle that we don’t often get to see about the patients and family members. This is Grace’s story, as told by her granddaughter.
“My grandmother was chronically ill for almost 15 years. We were in and out of the hospital almost monthly. We used to ask the staff when they were going to name a wing after her or reserve a room in her name. Given all of that, we could never understand why, every time we entered the emergency room, they had absolutely no information on hand for her.”
“The process was excruciating. My grandmother would go into another episode of heart failure, or her atherosclerosis would act up, and we’d call 911, not wanting to waste any time. They’d arrive and spend ten minutes asking us questions – name, birth date, list of symptoms, list of medications, etc. We’d give them all of the information in detail while sitting in the ambulance. As we exited the ambulance, we’d wait as the EMT relayed all of this information to whatever Emergency Department nurse happened to be at the desk. That nurse would then turn to us, pad and pen in hand, and ask the exact same questions.”
“Specialists would be called, and we would be told that nothing could be done until they arrived. We had been through this, in this exact same place, countless times, but we had to wait as though this was brand new. We felt so frustrated and helpless as the specialists arrived, squinted at a scribbled chart, and asked us questions we’d answered three times. By this time, my grandmother had been in the ED for at least an hour, if not longer, often in so much pain she could barely speak. There would still be no plan, no team in place, no course of action. Medical staff were following EMS out the door frantically jotting notes about a patient just brought in, while they were rushing out the door to pick up the next call; everyone was jotting things down on their clipboards and handing it off to someone who could barely read it…it seemed so ridiculous and inefficient.”
“So many times we asked why the process couldn’t be expedited, why this had to be so drawn out and complicated. ‘It’s just the way things are done,’ would be the constant reply.”
“Recently my cousin, a paramedic, began excitedly talking to me about a new system his organization was using mobile telemedicine. He talked about the seamless transfer of information from first responder to ED nurse to specialist, no scribbled notes, no repeated questions and no wasted time. I often wonder how much discomfort we could have saved my grandmother if our hospital had adopted this system.”
Grace’s story is a common one. Wasted time, extended ED waits, messy information transfer- GD’s CAREpoint and e-Bridge solves all of those unnecessary issues with clear, reliable and usable technology. One workstation and its related apps can provide a means for answering EMS calls, logging patient information, sending data to doctors both in and outside of the hospital, assembling a team all to be ready for the patient when the ambulance pulls up to the door.
Patients deserve more streamlined care and will benefit from medical centers that can use mobile telemedicine.
Streamline the process and experience better results for every piece of the emergency care puzzle, including a better experience for patients.
Contact GD to learn more today.