Effective or open and clear communication among team members promotes effective teamwork and encourages clarity within the patient care team. Basically, clear and open communication is important in fostering collaboration and teamwork and plays a critical role in ensuring that errors are minimized (McGonigle & Mastrian, 2018). Several communication technologies have been instrumental in promoting effective communication within interprofessional teams. These technologies have been successful in achieving interprofessional communication and care delivery coordination. For instance, telemedicine technologies seeks to enhance patient health through application of interactive communication between the health care providers and the patients remotely via video, audio, and other electronic technologies (Falconer & Kho, 2018).
In addition to enhancing the communication between the health care providers and the patients, communication technologies also enhance coordination of care amongst the interprofessional team members. For example, coordination of care is enhanced by timely updates of the EHRs by the health care providers thus allowing others to effectively receive the patient’s health care information (Falconer & Kho, 2018). Likewise, communication technologies such as the web-based communication devices enable collaborative decision making within the interprofessional teams.
Communication systems in healthcare include secure messaging, mobile phones, video conferencing, telehealth, secure apps, email, and secure fax. It involves relaying and sharing information between health professionals as well as patients. The use of these communication technologies can impact the way nurses assess, formulate care plans, provide care, document care provided and even clinical decision making (Rouleau et al., 2017). The use of communication technology enhances the collaboration and coordination of the interprofessional team since there are now multiple, secure ways to relay health information to other related providers.
High-quality interprofessional communication helps reduce errors and improves quality care and patient outcomes (Bardach et al., 2017). Most, if not all healthcare providers in the US have now transitioned to the use of electronic health records system so there have been various technology development to enhance the communication technology within the electronic healthcare record system which will make it easier for providers to securely relay health information which can be tracked and maintained within the system. In the current electronic health record system that we use in our organization, my favorite feature is being able to send secure messages to physicians, nurses, and other healthcare team members and instantly get responses. And for providers that are not using the same electronic health care system, I like the health information exchange system that we have which allows us to access the health records of our common patients. It eliminates the need to pick up the phone and be placed on hold for a long time just to get in touch with our other providers.
References:
Bardach, S., Real, K., & Bardach, D. (2017). Perspectives of healthcare practitioners: An exploration of interprofessional communication using electronic medical records. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 31(3), 300–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/13561820.2016.1269312
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