Incoming Call Context for Urgency Triage in Clinical Communication
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Solution Overview
Problem
Healthcare providers in busy environments often ignore incoming calls or pages due to a lack of information about their urgency or relevance, leading to potential delays in responding to critical medical situations.
Innovation Solution
A communication system that provides call context information to healthcare workers by automatically assembling and formatting relevant clinical information from various sources, such as EMR systems and sensors, and presenting it alongside incoming calls to help recipients assess the nature and urgency of the communication.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If call context information is provided to healthcare workers, then the ability to assess urgency and prioritize responses is improved, but the complexity of the communication system increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a server as an intermediary component that automatically retrieves and processes clinical information from existing healthcare systems (EMR, lab systems, etc.) and attaches relevant context to communication requests. This mediator handles the complexity of information gathering and filtering, keeping the user interface simple while providing comprehensive context information to healthcare workers.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary actions by automatically retrieving, processing, and organizing clinical information before a healthcare worker needs to assess a communication request. The server proactively gathers relevant patient data, lab results, and clinical context in advance, so that when a communication request arrives, the context information is already prepared and attached, eliminating the need for manual information gathering.
2Loss of time
If automated assembly of clinical information is implemented, then the time to convey relevant information is reduced, but the device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The server implements self-service functionality by automatically retrieving clinical information from connected healthcare systems without requiring manual intervention. The system autonomously queries EMR systems, lab information systems, and other clinical data sources, processes the retrieved information, and attaches relevant context to communication requests, eliminating the need for human operators to manually gather and format clinical information.
Solution Approach 2:
The server is designed as a multi-functional component that can retrieve and process various types of clinical information from multiple different sources (EMR systems, lab systems, monitoring systems). This universal approach allows a single system to handle diverse information needs across different clinical scenarios, reducing the need for separate specialized systems for each type of information retrieval.
3Reliability
If comprehensive clinical information is provided with each call, then the relevance and accuracy of communication assessment is improved, but the quantity of information transmitted increases
Solution Approach 1:
The server extracts only the most relevant clinical information needed for communication assessment from the comprehensive clinical data available in healthcare systems. Rather than transmitting all available patient data, the system selectively extracts and attaches only the context information directly relevant to assessing the urgency and appropriateness of the communication request, such as critical lab values, active alerts, or time-sensitive clinical conditions.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies local quality by providing different levels or types of context information based on the specific communication scenario and recipient needs. Rather than uniformly providing the same comprehensive information set for all communications, the server tailors the information attached to each communication request based on the specific clinical context, communication type, and recipient role, ensuring relevance while managing information quantity.
Data Source
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AI summary
Embodiments include methods, devices, systems, and non-transitory process-readable storage media for providing incoming call context information to a communication device in a medical communication system. Some embodiments may include receiving, by a server device, clinical information in one or more information feeds from one or more other devices, determining, by the server device, whether a communication request from a first communication device for a second communication device has been received, and sending, by the server device, to the second communication device a communication request message including call context information that is drawn from the clinical information. Call context information includes patient and clinical information to enable a recipient to understand the nature and urgency of a call before answering.