Mobile Clinical Communication Ecosystem Supports Asante’s Award-Winning Patient Care
Strategic partnership with Halo Health helps Asante streamline workflows, standardize communication, and stay connected with the clinical community
Key Learnings
- Map out and document your current existing workflows and communication processes
- Determine where workflow, communication and on-call scheduling efficiency gains can be made with Halo
- Determine who are the most influential groups, (i.e., hospitalists and nurses) and work with them to find out their needs and pain points
- Anyone who sees a patient should have clinical mobility
- Determine how a communication platform can streamline operational areas too, such as IT requests and issues – especially for remote workers
- Make sure staff has pockets to carry their mobile phones
- Make sure your teams receive high-quality training within two weeks of going live so it’s fresh on their minds.
- Ensure there is a path to integrating with the EHR to include patient record info via messaging
"There are a lot of non-clinical factors that can have an impact on your communications. Before Halo, we could only solve these problems in person. When you have to work remotely, in particular, having an alternative to in-person communications is valuable."
- Lee David Milligan, MD, CHCIO, Asante
“If we really want to take great care of our patients, we’ve got to take great care of our providers and nurses. Leveraging technology to automate is one of the ways we can take great care of them”
- Lee David Milligan, MD, CHCIO, Asante
“Halo partnered with us and really asked what challenges we had, what problems we were trying to solve, and then helped tailor the platform to meet that.”
- Michele Strickland, MBA, BSN, RN, Director of Informatics, Asante
Asante Background
A provider of comprehensive medical care to more than 600,000 people in Southern Oregon and Northern California, Medford, Oregon-based Asante has three hospitals and more than 30 locations. With the largest health system in a nine-county region, they have more than 5,800 employees and award-winning care. Asante’s dedication to patient care and clinician satisfaction drove them to find the right clinical communication solution.
They took a holistic and strategic approach to deploying the right network infrastructure, mobile devices, cloud-based software and integrations.
Asante partnered with Halo Health to deploy its cloud-hosted Halo Clinical Collaboration Platform, and with SMG3Rx to implement 800+ Zebra TC51 smartphone, software and services to establish a mobile clinical ecosystem.
How Halo is Helping Asante
- Reduce the time it takes to respond to emergency codes
- Improve workflows and automation to increase organization efficiency
- Standardize clinical communication
- Increase collaboration between community physicians
- Tackle challenges that are difficult to solve remotely
Improving Clinical Collaboration
Asante now has 6,500 active Halo users that exchange an average of 1 million mobile messages a month. Clinicians are communicating more than ever and are continually finding new uses for the Halo Platform.
The health system has expanded connection and collaboration with local community physicians. By encouraging local practices’ participation in Asante’s Halo communication network, Asante upholds its responsibility to provide patient care anywhere and at any time.
“We are trying to standardize how our staff clinically communicate with outside clinicians. When we develop or revise workflows, we provide clinical staff with the opportunity to learn about and start using the Halo Platform.
We’re also introducing physicians from the community to Halo so they can join our communication network.”
- Michele Strickland, MBA, BSN RN,
Director of Informatics, Asante
Committed to Patient Care
“It’s really about communicating around patient care. If a primary care doctor is concerned about a patient, they’ll simply use Halo to identify who they’re going to speak to, send a message, get some feedback back, and make a plan. After it’s all said and done, frequently, the specialist will then get back in touch with the primary care doctor via Halo on a secure platform that I no longer have to worry about.”
- Lee David Milligan, MD, CHCIO, Asante
The Importance of Partnership
Asante’s work with Halo Health, SMG3Rx and Zebra demonstrates the impact that having the right communication platform, devices, and partners has on an entire health system.
“We have had a terrific experience with these folks [Halo] and we really see them as a partner. I don’t use the word ‘partner’ lightly — as you can imagine, we have hundreds and thousands of vendors that we work with and only a handful are truly partners.”
- Lee David Milligan, MD, CHCIO, Asante