Hospitals rely heavily on communication and technology to provide the best care for their patients. Communication is essential for hospitals to stay organized, efficient, and up to date. Technology plays a large role in helping hospitals achieve this goal. Together, they have a major impact on patient care and safety.
Inadequate handoffs between healthcare providers, lack of access to medical records, and failure to communicate important information between different departments lead to costly effects. Such poor communication can lead to medical errors, delays in diagnosis or treatment, and even death.
Therefore, it’s essential for hospitals to address these communication issues with the best-fit technology solutions for their unique needs to ensure patient safety and quality of care.
Communication technologies such as email and text messaging help hospitals keep in touch with patients and ensure that they are receiving the best possible care. And increasingly, many organizations are modernizing with Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for more efficient and secure communication between medical professionals and patients.
Here’s how adding VoIP to your hospital’s technology toolbox can be a critical asset:
VoIP represents a cost-effective way for hospitals to create a robust communication system to keep in contact with patients, colleagues, and in-house teams. Using an internet connection to make and receive phone calls is just a fraction of the cost of using traditional landline communications. This is especially true with long-distance phone calls and video calls, as a VoIP system can help physicians connect and collaborate with specialists and patients around the country — and the world.
A VoIP phone system enables hospitals to sort patient calls and answer them based on priority, as well as track the status of each call to see that calls are attended to in a prompt manner. These faster, more reliable connections can be used to quickly share important information or provide assistance in emergency situations, when response time is most critical.
What’s more, appointments and billing are also made simpler using a VoIP system, which allows for access to patient accounts and identification based on this information.
Your communication system is the hub of your healthcare operation, and you can’t afford to have downtime. A VoIP system installs over your current internet infrastructure making, installation seamless—and fast. In fact, there is virtually no downtime during installation and no disruptions since much of the infrastructure needed to run the system is already in place, providing you with internet access.
Many technologies, including integrated technologies and telehealth—both of which are supported by VoIP phone systems—are poised to help providers deliver an exceptional level of care to patients. While some technologies are more sophisticated and difficult to adopt, VoIP remains a cost-effective, easy-to-use way to bring faster, more effective healthcare to a broad range of patients, regardless of their geographic location.
This is not only beneficial to patients, but staff—reducing on-the-job frustration and helping medical professionals collaborate with one another more effectively, as well as with patients.
Relying on your internal IT infrastructure, VoIP makes it difficult for external hackers to intercept your encrypted, internal data. Ultimately, with its improved security measures, VoIP ensures that sensitive patient data is kept safe from unauthorized access.
Overall, VoIP provides healthcare organizations with an effective way to improve their communication and patient care processes. This in turn ensures that hospitals are providing the highest quality of care possible.
At Blue Technologies, we specialize in providing integrated communication solutions featuring VoIP systems. Using VoIP, we can help you create or augment your telemedicine or telehealth offerings and deliver robust web and video conferencing abilities, voicemail, instant messaging, long-distance calling, and more. And we can do so while reducing costs for a healthier bottom line.
Help your healthcare team provide exceptional care to your patients. Contact a Blue Technologies consultant today and explore how our suite of communications solutions, including VoIP, can assist.