Everyone dreads a bad health news call from a loved one, especially when that family member is not only far away but overwhelmed with navigating their new diagnosis. Distance and distress can make medical instruction hard to remember and communicate. Before he co-founded Playback Health, Greg Odland received one of those unfortunate calls in his family and had to navigate a care strategy among his geographically separated family members. In times of medical crisis, it’s hard to know all the facts when not directly communicating with a loved one’s doctor. Now, as co-founder of Playback Health, Greg looks back on that moment of being far from a loved one’s point of care (and feeling helpless because of it) as motivation to make the healthcare process more connected and personal for patients and their families. 

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The Importance of Care Coordination, In and Outside of Hospitals

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) define care coordination as “the process of ensuring that the patient’s health needs and preferences for health information and services are met across the continuum of care.” Inside a health system, that continuum of care refers to all the different kinds of nurses, doctors, and specialists that cross the same patient’s path, adding their expertise and input based on what they observe and have been told about the patient. When a multi-clinician care team is not organized, nuanced information about the patient can fall through the cracks and slow down the treatment path and healing journey. Researchers from CHIDS (the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems) at the University of Maryland estimated that hospitals waste $12 billion annually due to poor communication. That revenue loss translates to inadequate patient care, with communication failures among hospitalized patients' most common causes of adverse events, according to a CRICO report on miscommunication malpractice. Good communication is imperative to providing quality care. Positive health outcomes increase when an entire care team is organized, communicative, and engaged. 

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Outside the hospital, it’s also helpful when a patient’s loved ones are equally organized. When everyone caring for the patient is on the same page and understands treatment goals and care instructions, patients heal more efficiently. Numerous studies have shown that with increased education on treatment goals for patients and their loved ones, the rates of patient re-hospitalization decrease. Though it’s harder for clinicians to control what kind of care their patients receive outside the hospital, direct and effective communication with everyone in a patient’s care community makes all the difference.

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How Playback Strengthens All Care Teams

When it comes to organizing a patient’s care team in a hospital, Playback’s platform diminishes the opportunity for any potential gaps in communication between providers. Playback’s mobile cloud technology allows clinicians to share video recordings and automated transcriptions of their exact findings and instructions with multiple clinicians and specialists, gathering everyone around the same mobile record simultaneously. Instead of a never-ending chain of translations, everyone sees the same thing. When everyone receives the same information from the source, miscommunication plummets. 

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Playback lets patients loop in trusted family and friends by sharing clinician video instructions directly to their families’ mobile devices via Playback’s secure mobile cloud technology. When patients are elderly or cognitively impaired post-surgery, the ability of a family to hear directly from their loved one’s doctor on their mobile devices can transform the quality of care that patient receives at home. Modern medicine ought to offer modern communication strategies. Playback can shrink the distances between all care teams and a patient’s exact moment of care. 

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Playback Health’s unified clinical platform helps patients receive the best possible care, starting with the best possible communication. Get started today. 

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