Palomar Health has unveiled a new mobile app that allows physicians to use their own smartphones or tablets to communicate with nurses and retrieve patient information.
The San Diego-based health system, the largest of its kind in California and a national leader in mHealth innovation, worked with Extension Healthcare to develop the Extension Engage Mobile App. The app leverages staff assignment data from Rauland-Borg's ResponderSync interface and patient data from the Cerner Electronic Health Record to give clinicians instant access to information on their smartphones.
“One of the keys to improving the delivery of patient care is to ensure that all members of the healthcare team can communicate quickly and easily,” said Benjamin Kanter, MD, Palomar Health's chief medical information officer, in a recent press release. “Whether in preparation for rounds in the hospital or when calling the hospital to check on a patient’s status, it can be difficult and time consuming for a physician to locate the responsible nurse.”
Palomar Health deployed Extension's clinical workflow and communication platform at Palomar Medical Center – its $1 billion "Hospital of the Future," which opened in 2012 – and has since opened a Glassomics incubator at the hospital that studies the healthcare potential for Google Glass and certain so-called "smart watches." The health system also has a long relationship with mHealth vendor AirStrip and Cisco, which supplies Cisco 7925 wireless phones for the hospital's nurses.
According to Kanter, a physician armed with the Extension Engage app (more than 50 have already downloaded it) can look up a patient by name or room number, access the patient's medical record, and call the patient's room or the nurse assigned to that patient.
“This simple functionality will significantly improve nurse-physician communication, physician satisfaction and, ultimately, patient care,” he said in the release. “To the best of our knowledge, we are the first hospital in the country to implement anything like it.”
Franklin Martin, MD, PMC's chairman of the surgery department, downloaded the app about three weeks ago.
“I use it as I’m walking into the hospital to make my rounds," he said in the press release. "It’s an easy way to locate my patients in our large hospital. Before having the Extension app, I would have to log into our electronic health record, which was a cumbersome process. With the app, it’s only two quick steps and it definitely reduces frustration in my practice."
"When I’m outside the hospital, I rely on the app to contact my patients’ nurses," he added. "I know other physicians are happy that it works on both iPhones and Androids.”
