The Connected Care Team

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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