Discover Effective Communication in Healthcare

In a healthcare setting, there’s always room to improve communication. Communication gaps, whether they're within your office or between patients can have negative consequences.

By focusing on effective communication you’ll improve your relationships with patients and make your workplace more efficient.

With effective communication procedures and technologies in place, you’ll be more likely to avoid costly medical errors and elevate the quality of your organization across the board.

Learn why effective communication in healthcare is so important, and how UCaas, CCaaS, and VoIP providers can make communication easier and much more efficient.

The Importance of Effective Communication in Healthcare

Without effective communication strategies in place, you’ll have much lower levels of patient satisfaction. In fact, the success of a patient’s ability to follow through with guidelines and recommendations depends greatly on the provider's ability to communicate clearly and succinctly. Not only that, but patients who feel listened to and understood will have much higher levels of patient satisfaction.

But, communication isn’t only important between your patients and care providers, but throughout your entire organization. This includes doctors, nurses, call center staff, administrative staff, housekeeping, and more. Plus, you need to think about how to communicate effectively across various departments as well.

Benefits of effective communication in healthcare:

  • Improved diagnostic accuracy: patient and provider interviews will be more accurate, useful, and helpful.
  • Better patient follow-through: with effective communication practices in place, you’ll make it easier and more likely for patients to follow through with care protocols.
  • Higher patient satisfaction: by reducing the risk of human and system errors you increase the chances of patients having a positive experience.
  • Greater team satisfaction: effective team communication will enhance relationships, improve job satisfaction, and reduce job turnover.

Effective Healthcare Communication Strategy Should Include

Every healthcare provider will have different methods of communication. However, effective strategies will usually include the elements below:

  • Timely Information Delivery: In health settings, information needs to be delivered quickly and it needs to be accurate. Not every situation will be life or death, but you can’t afford to have time delays, or worse, have the wrong information delivered to your doctors and patients.
  • Easily Integrated Into Company Workflows: If you’re implementing a new communication methodology, then this needs to be integrated into your existing workflows and your entire team needs to be on board. Implementing new communication methods won’t be very effective if only one department is using them.
  • Built-in Compliance Protocols: As a healthcare provider, you need to ensure HIPAA compliance across all forms of communication, including verbal, written, and digital communication. Procedures for obtaining and securing patient information need to be in alignment with HIPAA guidelines.

Plus, if you’re using a third-party provider for cloud messaging, call center, or VoIP capabilities, then you’ll need to ensure that they are complaint too.

How UCaaS, CCaaS, and VoIP Providers Can Help? 

Beyond person-to-person communication, you’ll also want to consider how you’ll communicate digitally as well. Whether you’re taking patient phone calls, conducting virtual meetings, or communicating via email or messaging systems you’ll need these systems to be efficient.

By using a UCaaS, CCaaS, or VoIP provider you can easily communicate with patients and staff no matter where they happen to be. A solid cloud communication provider will not only make communication easier, but you’ll also keep your communication standards in alignment with HIPAA guidelines. This will help to ensure the privacy of any sensitive patient health information that’s shared.

Sometimes sending an instant message might be faster than picking up the phone, or disclosing information via a video conference will be easier than an in-person meeting.

Overall, communication software providers exist to help streamline your existing communication processes.

There’s a high level of importance of effective communication in healthcare. Without effective communication, your organization will have lower levels of patient satisfaction and will be much more prone to error. This leads to things like high patient turnover, higher employee stress and more. By implementing effective communication protocols, including, utilizing digital communication software, you’ll be able to more effectively serve your patients and workers alike.


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