Avaya Healthcare: Leveraging Telecom Solutions to Improve Patient Care

"Most people think of us as the phone guys," says Sanjeev Gupta, general manager of Avaya's (News - Alert) Healthcare Solutions division, "but we're much more than that." In fact, he continues, "Avaya has made a sustained investment in R&D to create solutions that improve clinical workflow." Gupta believes that how we use communication tools can make a significant impact on the life cycle of patient care, from preventative medicine to chronic care management.

Avaya, formerly part of Lucent Technologies and before that, AT&T (News - Alert), has focused on providing communications solutions to businesses since the days of those indestructible, black rotary phones. Over the years their product set has evolved to complex phone systems, call centers solutions and Voice over IP. So while they continue to develop new applications, many of Avaya's innovations in healthcare communications are actually created by leveraging existing technology.

For example, Gupta says that the Avaya team discovered that at one large hospital, there were somewhere between 600 to 900 chronic care patients per care manager. In order to cope with the huge patient loads, care managers were performing simple triage, assigning red, yellow or green severity to each of the patients. But without on-going monitoring, "yellows were becoming red, greens were becoming yellow … there simply was insufficient time for follow ups."

Avaya's Patient Contact Solution addresses this problem, using existing telephone technology to reach out to patients with features like automated medicine reminders, requests for glucose monitoring data or to call the patient and ask them to enter their latest blood pressure reading. On the back end, data is collected and integrated into the patient's electronic medical records. Avaya uses standard interfaces with their products so integration to a hospital or clinic's records is seamless.

Avaya is also working to help nurses spend less time with administrative tasks and more time with patients. For instance, within the hospital setting, coordination between departments is often inefficient and expensive. Delays in the hospital admissions and discharge processes can cause back up in the ER, forcing patients to wait to be moved to their rooms. Nurses spend a significant part of their day tracking people and assets and trying to keep the patient process moving. Avaya's Patient Discharge Solution is designed to help with this by automating discharge approvals and notifications, moving patients through the process more rapidly.

Another way Avaya is trying to decrease non-patient time for nurses is with their Mobile Device Checkout. Nurses scan their badge and a mobile phone and the device is automatically programmed to match their contacts lists based on their assignment. They also get alerts about patient status. So nurses aren't sitting at a desk trying to reach doctors or specialists; instead, the system does it for them automatically and updates them via the phone.

Gupta has seen increased interest in healthcare IT spending on the part of hospitals and says that decision makers are "getting pressure because of stimulus spending and the need to have full EMR adoption." Avaya is certainly not without competition from telephone systems providers. Companies like Seimens and Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) have divisions that focus on healthcare solutions as well. However, he is finding they are able to open doors because of their reputation for quality and reliability. Or maybe it's the fond memories of those old black phones.

By Robin Wright , Consultant http://medhealth.tmcnet.com/