At a time when hospital officials around the country are looking for proof that mHealth-based communication tools will help them save money, officials at LibertyHealth's Jersey City Medical Center are offering hard figures.
The 300-bed hospital, which implemented the Practice Unite smartphone messaging app roughly one year ago to improve clinical communications, recently reported that the program has saved at least $2 million.
“The application feels like it is designed specifically for our nurses and physicians,” said Joseph Scott, LibertyHealth's president and chief executive officer, in a press release touting the savings. Scott added that "adoption has exceeded our expectations."
Hospital officials broke down the savings in three areas:
- Physicians reported a 20 percent faster discharge rate thanks to improved communications, resulting in savings of about $720,000.
- Hospital officials say they saved about $120,000 per active physician by avoiding "referral leakage." In other words, by using the Practice Unite app physicians were able to more quickly meet the needs of their patients and keep them in the hospital network, rather than having them switch to someone outside the network.
- Surgeons reported that response times to clinical queries dropped from 2-4 hours to 15-30 minutes, while Emergency Department officials reported moving patients through the ED 30 minutes faster, reducing delays by as much as 15 percent.
Practice Unite is the first app in the arsenal of Navio Health, a Newark, N.J.-based startup that debuted in February 2013, and Jersey City Medical Center was the company's beta tester and first client (they've since added four more). In an mHealth News story last June, company and hospital officials foresaw a vast improvement in hospital communications over the old methods of paging systems, e-mails or a shout down the hallway.
"We envision it as the hospital's proprietary mobile communications platform," Stuart Hochron, Navio Health's chief medical officer, said at the time. "It kind of pulls the medical staff together."
"It's a simple, simple thing to use, and it's been great for us," added Scott. "It could be a key communication component to accountable care. And with health information exchanges looking to (gain traction), this might be that bridge."
In a recent interview with New Jersey Tech Weekly, Hochron and Adam Turinas, Navio Health's president, said Practice Unite provides a HIPAA-compliant platform from which all members of the care team can communicate and share data in real-time. They reported that once the app is downloaded, it has a 93 percent to 97 percent open rate among doctors and nurses who are using it.
"More than 90 percent of doctors have smartphones, and many of them say that texting, sending pictures of wounds (and) sending photos of medical charts are things they want to do," Turinas told Tech Weekly. "This is where we come in. We provide a very simple, approved platform to send secure messages and secure photos so they can do this in an encrypted way that will be HIPAA-compliant for all the people … involved in the delivery of care. It does a lot more, but this is the initial problem we solve."
Hochron and Turinas said the app can be customized for each hospital, enabling clinicians to create patient notebooks, and they're now looking to pilot a patient-facing version of the app that would allow patients to communicate with their care team.
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