The Connected Care Team TigerConnect

In this episode of The Connected Care Team podcast, Mohammed Shaik, MD, PhD, and Brittney Newby, MD, PhD, pediatric chief residents at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, share the challenges of balancing manual resident scheduling with physician wellness and discuss AI’s potential applications in medicine. 
Scheduling complexity and work-life balance 
Dr. Shaik and Dr. Newby discuss the intricacies of managing scheduling in a medical residency program. A central focus of theirs is balancing educational requirements and residents’ personal lives while ensuring quality patient care. As chief residents, they tirelessly coordinate schedules, communicate with stakeholders, and strive to uphold the well-being of fellow residents. 
“Staffing the hospital is also part of our responsibility. We need to make sure the patients on our floors are covered by the providers, which oftentimes are residents, in a way that is safe, effective, and efficient. This requires us to talk to a lot of people across the hospital to make that happen.” 
Mohammed Shaik, MD, PhD 
Setting boundaries 
As co-chief residents, both doctors reflect on the unexpected workload that comes with their leadership role and the kind of environment they want to foster. They emphasize the importance of setting boundaries, both for themselves and the residents they mentor, to maintain work-life balance and uphold their values in the demanding environment of medical residency. 
“What I did not expect this year as a chief is the amount of tasks we have. Naturally, your job bleeds into other aspects of your life. So, I think even more this year, we've had to work hard and make sure that we keep those values and keep those boundaries. And I think that's something we try to teach and convey to the residents as well.” 
Brittney Newby, MD, PhD 
AI in healthcare 
Both Dr. Newby and Dr. Shaik express enthusiasm for the potential of AI in healthcare administration. They envision leveraging ChatGPT and other AI tools to streamline administrative tasks, saving significant time and effort. With the ability to generate scripts or gather large pieces of information, AI could greatly enhance efficiency in medical settings. 
“I love the idea of using ChatGPT or other AI interfaces for administrative tasks. You could literally type in a query to ChatGPT and ask it to write a script or code that would potentially take hours and hours to write. So, I think that it could certainly improve our efficiency. And I'm excited to see where the automation field goes over the next couple of years.” 
Brittney Newby, MD, PhD 

Related:  
Connect with Mo Shaik on LinkedIn  Connect with Brittney Newby on LinkedIn Learn more about TigerConnect Resident Scheduling Follow TigerConnect on LinkedIn for episodes, announcements, and news  
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In this episode of The Connected Care Team podcast, Christopher DeFlitch, M.D., chief medical information officer at Penn State Health, shares how the organization has benefited from healthcare technology. Dr. DeFlitch discusses how improved connectivity, optimized workflows, and contextual communication have helped improve patient outcomes.
The role of technology in healthcare delivery
As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve, leveraging technology to manage care delivery is becoming increasingly critical. Christopher DeFlitch, M.D., has spent the past 25 years working to help healthcare professionals at Penn State Health understand how technology can improve processes and patient outcomes. DeFlitch notes that asynchronous communication is key to improving healthcare delivery – and better serves patient care.
Efficient healthcare communication
TigerConnect has proved essential to communication at Penn State Health, where Dr. DeFlitch notes that the organization sends 2 million secure messages monthly. Better connection and TigerConnect Roles and Teams have significantly improved the efficiency and speed of clinical collaboration. By setting up different roles within the organization, healthcare professionals can engage in role-based messaging, putting new messages into greater context. For example, instead of receiving a message from Dr. Smith, role-based messaging displays the sender as ‘Critical Lab Results Hospital A.’ This cuts out the antiquated process of using a pager to send a page and wait for a callback.
“So, all of a sudden, I've got four or five minutes of work as opposed to I can look at this, and I can see that it’s for real, and I gotta do something with it. Or you look at it and say, ah, no, I knew about that already, and I can just bypass it. I mean, that's a second, as opposed to minutes conversation. And it makes the patient care, I think, a little bit more effective, and it makes me as a physician more efficient.” – Christopher DeFlitch, M.D.
Leveraging Healthcare Technology for the Betterment of Patients
In the last two decades, healthcare communication and collaboration have come a long way. Dr. DeFlitch believes that healthcare technology has made it easier for healthcare professionals to connect with their patients and offer them better care. But he also acknowledges that there's still a lot of work to be done, especially when addressing the social indicators of health. DeFlitch thinks that the healthcare industry must leverage technology and expertise to improve the long-term outcomes of families in need. And he believes that this responsibility will be taken up by the next generation of healthcare employees, who are already socially connected and tech-savvy. Leveraging healthcare technology can help the healthcare industry do what's right for patients, especially those facing social healthcare barriers.
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In this episode of The Connected Care Team podcast, Dr. Kai Romero, chief medical officer at By the Bay Health, discusses mission-driven work, how communication technology streamlines the use of interdisciplinary teams in palliative care, and the importance of connectedness.
Mission-driven healthcare
Like many healthcare professionals, Dr. Kai Romero’s interest in medicine was rooted in family. Her father, a family practice physician who immigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen, instilled in Dr. Romero the importance of mission-driven work. With that as her guiding compass, Dr. Romero originally pursued emergency medicine before ultimately being drawn to hospice and palliative medicine. Her training in emergency medicine led her to quickly realize that the healthcare system is very challenging for seriously ill individuals and that emergency rooms cannot always meet their needs.
“You wouldn’t imagine it, but there’s quite a bit of overlap between the two fields, primarily in the sense hospice patients have the same emergencies as ER patients do. They just happen at home without an IV and without advanced equipment to manage them. And as a result, you have to do a lot of similar problem-solving and thoughtful diagnosis and treatment, but you’re doing it all within a far more resource-limited setting. – Dr. Kai Romero
Reliable patient and provider communication
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge for many healthcare organizations to physically provide care for patients. In addition to challenges with COVID-19, By the Bay Health has also encountered challenges during fire season in the Bay Area. Highways are often inaccessible during large fires, and the air quality is also a concern for staff who need to visit patients at their homes. With these challenges, the organization relies on fast and reliable communication to keep both staff and patients connected. By the Bay Health implemented TigerConnect Patient Engagement as a flexible solution to connect with both patients and interdisciplinary teams. 
“One hallmark of hospice and palliative medicine is the use of interdisciplinary teams to care for patients. So, it’s not just a nurse or a doctor, it’s also a social worker, a chaplain. And what the use of [the technology] has done is basically made it much easier to create a multipart interdisciplinary meeting with families so that it’s not reliant on any one person’s particular schedule, ability to drive X, Y, and Z location.” – Dr. Kai Romero
An opportunity for connectedness
In addition to palliative care, By the Bay Health also provides hospice, home health, and pediatric care services. The TigerConnect implementation was well-received by staff, with a large adoption on the palliative care side. With many in the organization still remote due to the pandemic, the technology has proven beneficial in connecting staff and shaping their patient communication.
“When I’m in a meeting and I hear a social worker describe what it is that they’re doing around existential grief with a patient, it shapes how I talk about symptom management or goals of care. And I think that kind of real-time learning from your peers is greatly enhanced by just having more exposure to them.” – Dr. Kai Romero
Related:
●      Connect with Dr. Kai Romero on LinkedIn
●      Learn more about the
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In this episode of The Connected Care Team podcast, Rebecca MacKinnon, founder, and CEO of 5th Dimension Strategies discusses her background in post-acute care and how technology factors into the shifting healthcare environment.
Meeting Demand in Post-Acute Care
Ask any healthcare professional why they joined the industry, and they will likely recount a personal story that motivated their decision. Rebecca MacKinnon’s interest in post-acute care was sparked in the late eighties when patients were being encouraged to self-manage their recovery process much sooner than in previous decades. After welcoming her second child, Rebecca returned home after just a 24-hour hospital stay.
“It always seemed an oddity to me that we spend less than 1% of our lives in a hospital or in a physician's office, but we spend probably 90% of our healthcare dollars in those two places. And so for me, post-acute just makes a lot of sense.” – Rebecca MacKinnon
Consulting in Health Tech 
After founding Beyond Now, a home health EMR software company, Rebecca sold the company to Cerner. The experience revealed her passion for working with early-stage companies, leading to the creation of 5th Dimension Strategies, an early-stage consulting firm that supports healthcare technology companies. Rebecca has helped lead several companies through various growth cycles within acute care and other healthcare environments through her work. 
“I think that any innovator who's entering healthcare has to pay particular attention to workflow and figure out how to create strategic relationships that really allow you to get into the steps that healthcare clinicians take.” – Rebecca MacKinnon
Engaging Patients in a Post-Acute Care Environment
As healthcare continues to shift to a post-acute care environment, providers are looking for ways to engage with patients outside the hospital. One of the biggest hurdles they face is the resistance of older patient demographics. Particularly in home health care, older patients have been slow to adopt healthcare technology, including virtual care and remote patient monitoring tools. Rebecca notes that younger demographics, who she refers to as “the new parent,” are big adopters of health tech.
“But I can say it's only the very oldest in, the 75 plus that are true resistance to tech because so much of the world has gone there. The rest of us know we have to adapt, it's just the pace of it.” – Rebecca MacKinnon
Related:
●      Connect with Rebecca MacKinnon on LinkedIn
●      Learn more about the TigerConnect Product Suite
Follow TigerConnect on LinkedIn for episodes, announcements, and news.
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Learn more about the TigerConnect Product Suite
Follow TigerConnect on LinkedIn for episodes, announcements, and news
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In this episode of The Connected Care Team podcast, Denise Pimintel, Clinical Program Manager at CommonSpirit Telehealth Network System, discusses how the healthcare industry has changed over the years, the value of secure messaging, and how the ongoing pandemic has made virtual care even more vital.
Augmenting care with technology
Denise Pimintel has always worked to bridge the gap between clinicians and technology. After serving as an army nurse and ICU nurse for a period of time, Denise went back to school to study health information technology in an effort to help clinicians work more efficiently. She has worked with the CommonSpirit Telehealth Network for the past eight years using technology to connect patients with providers.
"My desire has always been to bridge clinical folks with technology, to do our jobs more efficiently and to do a better job for the patients that we serve." – Denise Pimintel
The impact of secure messaging 
CommonSpirit implemented TigerConnect to incorporate secure messaging into clinical workflows. Denise says the move has been a game-changer in reaching clinicians and coordinating patient care. Since the clinician receiving the message can read it at their convenience, important conversations don't get interrupted or lost. Additionally, users can set up escalation rules if a message remains unread after a certain length of time. This allows the sending clinician to know the status of the message and removes barriers to collaboration.
"The message gets sent at the convenience of the person sending, and when it comes to the recipient, the recipient can choose to either look immediately, delay that look because he's in the middle of a conversation with somebody else, or pick it up, pass it on to somebody else if we have rules in it to escalate, if he hasn't looked at it in 5 minutes." – Denise Pimintel
Efficient critical care workflows
It isn't just about getting things done quickly but about doing them well. Denise uses TigerConnect in the workflows in her critical care area, enabling experts to reach patients within one or two minutes. This means that the patients get better care, and the nurses can see more patients. She even has the ability to notify code teams simultaneously. 
"In the critical care area, definitely, you know, response times of providers to the bedside have significantly increased or I should say decreased, meaning they get there quickly." – Denise Pimintel
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In this episode of The Connected Care Team podcast, Dr. Michael Davis, Director of Inpatient Systems for the Department of Medicine at Tufts Medical Center, shares how Tufts integrates secure messaging and scheduling to improve clinical communication.
Closed-Loop Communication
Tufts Medical Center implemented TigerConnect for smoother communication and coordination within the organization. Dr. Davis noted that compared to pagers, secure messaging from TigerConnect providers natural closed-loop communication. With pagers, clinicians have no way of knowing if their page has been received. But with TigerConnect, clinicians know immediately when a message has been read.
“So you have those read receipts, you know exactly what state your message is in. You can see whether it was sent or not. You can see whether it was delivered. And then finally you can see whether it’s been read and that read receipt is hugely helpful in supporting this natural form of closed-loop communication.” – Dr. Michael Davis
A Single Directory for Call Schedules
Tufts Medical Center also uses TigerConnect Physician Scheduling to have call schedules feed roles in the app. This allows Tufts to provide a single directory across all departments that is easily accessible. Staff no longer need to know the person inhabiting a role to coordinate patient care. 
“You don’t need to know who the cardiology consultant is at any given time. All you need to do is pick your phone up and search for cardiology consultant, and then you can message them directly.” – Dr. Michael Davis
Decentralizing the Scheduling Process for Bidirectional Communication
Dr. Davis was a chief resident of a 76-resident program for internal medicine at Tufts – so he understands the complexity of creating resident and physician schedules. Using TigerConnect Physician Scheduling has enabled Tufts Medical Center to dramatically reduce the amount of work spent on scheduling by executive administrators and program coordinators. 
“When somebody takes over a role in TigerConnect, that automatically then gets fed back into the [schedule] directory that the rest of the hospital sees to see who’s on call. So that bidirectional communication between the messenger app and the call scheduler has been very helpful.” – Dr. Michael Davis
 Related: 
Connect with Dr. Michael Davis on LinkedIn.Learn more about the TigerConnect Product suite.Follow TigerConnect on LinkedIn for the latest episodes, news, and announcements. 
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Learn more about the TigerConnect Product Suite
Follow TigerConnect on LinkedIn for episodes, announcements, and news
Subscribe to The Connected Care Team on your favorite platform to get new episodes first