Using Wireless Nurse Call Systems To Improve Patient Experience During COVID-19

COVID-19 has changed the healthcare landscape. One part of this change has been how customers perceive the patient experience. Patients are recognizing the role of their health and wellness on their overall wellbeing. As this awareness increases, patients have become more involved in their medical care and their experience during this care.

Patients are now looking for providers who listen to them and treat them with dignity and respect. In addition to the treatment they receive, patients are also looking for facilities with safety protocols in place and implement these protocols to keep patients safe.

One of the steps to improve patient experience is introducing wireless nurse call systems to communicate their needs to caregivers as these needs arise.

Track Patient Experiences

You cannot know where to improve your patient experience without first determining the type of experience patients associate with your facility. However, it might be hard to determine the key performance indicators to evaluate when measuring patient experience. Here are some of the KPIs to track:

• The net promoter scores tell you how many patients are likely to recommend your facility to another patient. When patients have a positive experience with your facility, they are more likely to tell others about their positive experiences. The same goes for negative experiences they have.
• Another important metric to evaluate customer experience is the satisfaction level. Patient satisfaction measures how the patient feels about the services offered. This metric gives you a good measure of patient’s perception of your services to identify what is working and what is not.
• Measuring your patient retention will also tell you about the experience patients have at your facility. When your facility retains more patients than it loses, it means that you also earn more as your patient acquisition costs reduce.
• The time it takes to attend to a customer’s needs can tell you a lot about the patient experience at your facility. Patients are discontented when they ask for help and do not get any. They are likely to stop asking for help at all, which also increases the risk of accidents. If your facility is using wireless nurse call systems, you can evaluate the response time based on the data collected. This data will include the time of the call, the time the nurse reached the patient, and the time a caregiver spends with the patient.  

Measuring as many metrics as possible will help you have an actual picture of the level of patient experience in your organization. You should also review your performance regularly to determine whether you are improving on areas that diminish the patients’ experience.

Offer Direct Communication

Good communication between the caregiver and patient improves customer experience. Therefore, your organization should work towards improving communication. One way to do this is by offering direct communication between caregivers and patients, where patients can communicate easily and directly to their caregivers when they need help.

Wireless nurse call systems provide patients and residents with a direct line of communication with nurses and caregivers. These devices directly improve the quality of nurse care the patient receives as well as the patient’s outcomes.

These systems allow patients to initiate alerts, for instance, when they need to go to the bathroom. When the patient initiates a call, the call is routed directly to the caregiver responsible for the patient. In the case of scheduled alerts, the caregiver can receive them when needed, thus ensuring they provide adequate assistance to patients.

By connecting the patient directly to the caregiver, your facility can reduce the number of steps a message must go through before reaching the relevant caregiver.

When caregivers receive messages from their patients, they can directly respond and communicate with the patient, while he or she waits for the caregiver. This gives the patient the confidence that the caregiver has received their message and their needs will be attended to.

Having direct communication with patients also reduces alarm fatigue, which often results in caregivers ignoring some alarms. However, when patients have a direct line of communication with their caregivers, they can tell their caregivers about their needs without the caregiver making multiple trips to and from the patient’s rooms.

Wireless nurse call systems are also equipped with real-time location tracking systems to help locate patients. Therefore, a nurse can tell immediately where the patient is as soon as the patient initiates a message.

In addition to communicating with the patients within the facility, you need to communicate with their loved ones about visitation protocols and the service restrictions during COVID-19. You should also communicate alternative visitation procedures such as video calling to allow them to interact with their loved ones.

Reduce Patient wait times

Patients today expect fast services. Therefore, as part of your efforts to improve customer satisfaction and experience, you should incorporate fast communication systems that allow instant sending and receiving of messages.

Wireless nurse call systems from Aidbell allow patients to send messages instantly by pressing a button. The message is delivered to the caregiver with details about the source and nature of the call. The nurse can communicate with the patient as they prepare to attend to the patient’s needs.

In addition, nurse call systems notify the patient when their message is received to grant them peace of mind as they wait for help.

Reducing wait times is not only important when patients are staying within the facility; you should reduce wait times for each patient who walks through your doors.

Another point where you can improve the wait times is at the reception area when taking in new patients. You should communicate with the patients regularly to keep them aware of what to expect, and when they can expect service. You can offer wireless paging systems through which you can notify them when it is their turn to be served.

Take Advantage of Visual Notifications

Wireless nurse call systems provide visual motivation through lights which helps reduce noise. Reduced noise is important for patient peace and relaxation while at your facility. It also helps reduce alarm fatigue.

Our systems support visual communication through hospital call lights of different colors, including red, blue, white, green, light blue, purple, and yellow. These colors indicate different calling information when the corridor lights light up.

In addition to having different colors, these corridor lights can be flashing, static, mute, or accompanied by an alarm depending on the status of the call.

Our wireless nurse call systems also come with unique management software that allows you to insert your floor map to see instantly where a call is coming from.

Final Word

The pandemic has changed the way patients think about their health. They want to be more involved in their care, leading to higher demand for health facilities to provide better care services. Improving your patient experience will improve your patient outcomes and lead to better revenues. Some of the steps you can take to improve customer experience include providing direct communication between caregivers and patients and tracking patient experiences to know what to work on.

Aidbell offers a range of wireless nurse call and paging systems that you can incorporate in your facility to improve the interactions between your staff and patients. You can learn more about our healthcare solutions here.