Why healthcare is a communication industry
Unpacking Accurx’s ambition for improving health systems and outcomes
Imagine you’re a fly on the wall in a busy healthcare setting. What do you see? You see doctors, nurses, administrators, receptionists, occupational therapists. And what are they all doing? They’re making patient referrals. They’re asking for second opinions. They’re coordinating patient care.
In a word, they’re communicating.
At Accurx, we’ve been humbled to have that fly-on-the-wall presence within healthcare since we started in 2016. During that time, we’ve had the chance to grow a nuanced understanding, and a rich appreciation for the work healthcare professionals do. But we’ve also seen that the challenges people in healthcare face come back time and again to that one thing: communication.
Having spent years in GP practices, doing user research and speaking to patients and clinicians, we’ve learnt that easy communication is key to great care. This has shaped our belief in a better-connected healthcare system, centred around patients, and which has communication and collaboration at its heart.
Crucially, we believe healthcare is a communication industry. Read on to find out why.
‘What did you do at work today?’
If you asked someone on the frontline of healthcare ‘What did you do at work today?’, you’re likely to hear an answer like:
‘I was chasing information from a patient to find out if there’s been any change in their symptoms.’
Or…
‘A patient came in with low kidney function. Since I wasn’t sure if it was an acute or a chronic problem, I had to contact their GP to find out what their normal kidney function is.’
Or…
‘I was trying to arrange a discharge for a patient so they can go home. To do that, I had to speak to the care home that they’re in, and the occupational therapist who’s going to visit them. I had to coordinate their care.’
These are the parts of people’s jobs that, more often than not, they don’t really enjoy doing. It’s completely understandable. People don’t go into healthcare because they want to spend half an hour on hold to speak to someone else in their patient’s care team.
On the patient’s side, communication can be just as much a challenge. Particularly with such a strained healthcare service, where burnout is as high as waiting lists are long. This means that patients often have to repeat themselves and plug any gaps in communication. If you’re a patient waiting months for treatments, you inevitably feel forgotten, lack clarity and confidence in your care and don’t know what stage of treatment you’re at. To cap it off, you can’t communicate easily with the people in charge of your care.
To understand how we solve these problems, we need to understand the huge change healthcare has gone through over the last half century.
Healthcare: From a knowledge industry to a communication industry
50 years ago, if you went to see a doctor about an ailment, they’d tell you what to do and any medicine, treatment or lifestyle changes you needed as a result. Communication was far less important because healthcare was generally an individual sport rather than a team sport.
But nowadays, healthcare’s much more complex. You have different services, specialisms and parts of the care system. But far from being needlessly convoluted, this complexity is the result of huge advances across the whole gamut of healthcare — and not just advances in medical and life sciences — but in how we think about delivering care.
Today, we all believe in the power of coordinated care — a belief shown through the growth and professionalisation of all kinds of different specialties and disciplines. The result is that, around one patient, you can now have a multitude of different services, each with a variety of different roles in it, from doctors and nursing staff to psychological therapists, occupational therapists and physios.
Getting integration right, means having the right communication
For decades, the healthcare system has been trying to solve the question of integration. And it’s not an easy problem to solve. How do we integrate health and social care? How do we integrate primary care and secondary care? How do we integrate physical care and mental healthcare? How do we bring together all these disparate services so that everyone who cares for a patient can seamlessly work together?
That’s what integration is about. It’s about getting a range of different stakeholders from different services to operate as a team. But as you can imagine, it’s really hard to work as a team if you can only communicate by sending dictated letters. Or if you’ve got to call a switchboard or page someone and then wait to get called back. Or if you have to send a patient a letter and wait for them to call up your service in order for you to contact each other and make shared decisions about their care.
So often when things go wrong in healthcare, the root cause is communication. It could be that a patient’s test results weren’t acted upon. Or that they were deteriorating but this wasn’t flagged to the right people so they ended up in hospital. That’s what it means when we fail to recognise that healthcare today is really a communication industry. It means we end up treating surface problems rather than the root causes, the symptoms rather than the condition.
Medical records: Engagement over documentation
But while healthcare has grown into a communications industry, this is still yet to be reflected in the way we store and use a patient’s record. To explain this, let’s skip back again to healthcare’s earlier days. Medical records. When formal medical records started, your physician would simply write on a piece of paper what they’d observed and what their proposed treatment for you was. Then, eventually, comes computerisation and we digitise this information (at least in part — there’s still a mix of paper and electronic medical records used across the NHS).
The good thing about such records is that they’re patient-centred — which is exactly what they need to be. Every prescription, every test result, every consultation is all about that patient. The downside is that this record is used primarily for documentation purposes rather than collaboration and sharing information across teams. You enter a record on your system, and it stays there. You can’t communicate its contents quickly and easily. The information potential within that record isn’t properly realised unless it’s shared and used collaboratively across those coordinated care teams described above.
Instead of this, today there’s a hotchpotch of systems to communicate about and with patients: email, fax, post, phone calls, pagers, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams. Healthcare staff can’t get their computers to show them all of the emails about a given patient, or all of the Whatsapp messages, or letters. Of course, you can put a letter in the record system, but you can’t easily and quickly interact back and forth that way.
So how do we move from a system of record to one of engagement? I believe — perhaps unsurprisingly — that the answer to that question is Accurx.
Accurx: patient-centred communication
From team structures to record-keeping, healthcare’s a messy industry. The good news is that healthcare staff are great at sorting mess out — as long as they have the means to do so.
If healthcare professionals have the means to communicate well, they have the means to deliver great care to patients. That’s why we’ve developed Accurx as a platform that (1) is genuinely patient-centred, (2) places communication at the core of healthcare delivery, and (3) enables teams to collaborate around patient data, rather than just document it.
Our software also gives healthcare staff full visibility of previous communication, so that all the different people involved in a patient’s care have continuity of care and don’t have to keep starting from scratch.
When you look at the healthcare system today and some of its biggest challenges — waiting lists, recovering from COVID, workforce burnout — that’s where communication can have an immediate impact. Because if you can make communication easy, you can save staff time, make them happier, and make patients healthier along the way. And in the end, that’s what we’re all about, here at Accurx.
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