00:00 – 00:27
Dr. Kevin Halow: Hi, Dr. Kevin Halow here. Welcome once again to the Clinician Core podcast. In our last podcast, we talked a lot about physician burnout and how our fragmented healthcare communication system plays a role in fueling this burnout. On today’s podcast, we’re going to discuss a system fix that can help stem the rising tide of physician burnout. It’s called care team collaboration.
00:27 – 01:03
Dr. Kevin Halow: As a surgeon with decades of experience, what keeps me up at night is not just the surgery part. It’s all that stuff that happens surrounding those surgeries. It’s the silence between the cases. It’s that feeling that I get when I see a consult in the hospital and recommend a follow-up with me, or I discharge a patient from the hospital with instructions on the postoperative care. What happens after that sometimes can be anyone’s guess. I’m sure that you’ve experienced something similar. Often times I do not really know if the baton will be passed and if the care will be coordinated.
01:03 – 01:46
Dr. Kevin Halow: Recently, I had a two-week post-op visit on a patient in whom I placed iliac stents for critical limb ischemia. The surgery went great. Her outcome was excellent. But at the visit, she said to me, “I was so scared after I left the hospital. No one told me anything.” Think about that for a minute. Yeah, the patient had a great result, but how was her treatment? Why was this patient left to wander in the ether rather than be guided through her care? If that broke down, what other disconnects occurred? Did the patient’s primary care physician get a copy of my notes? Does the patient’s physician even know what I did?
01:46 – 02:27
Dr. Kevin Halow: Moreover, does she even know who I am or what I look like? Can she get hold of me if she has a question? Who was checking on the patient’s progress until the post-op visit? Will the patient be scheduled for postoperative testing? Has that information been properly conveyed? Patient outcome indicates the patient’s well-being. The clinical result may be perfect, but when communications break down, the patient may not necessarily feel better. Or shit, when complications arise, patients may be left to fend for themselves.
02:27 – 02:49
Dr. Kevin Halow: So, what is care team collaboration and how do we define it? At Clinician Core, we define it as a diversity of healthcare professionals working together, sharing knowledge and responsibilities in a coordinated network to provide the highest quality care to the patients.
02:49 – 03:07
Dr. Kevin Halow: What that means is the difference between a patient going home after surgery and healing versus bouncing back into the emergency room on post-op day five, septic with a wound infection because nobody has communicated with each other or the patient. Let’s take another example.
03:07 – 03:41
Dr. Kevin Halow: We have Mary Jones, a 76-year-old female, current smoker, is seen in the emergency room for hemoptysis. Upon workup, she’s found to have a left upper lobe mass and is sent to the pulmonologist. The pulmonologist diagnoses her with lung cancer. The pulmonologist then sends her to the surgeon who schedules her for surgical resection for curative intent. Postoperatively, after a successful resection in the hospital, the hospitalist and the intensivist help manage the patient.
03:41 – 04:09
Dr. Kevin Halow: They rearrange her medications a bit and add new inhalers prior to discharge. As an outpatient, the patient’s case is referred to tumor board by the hospitalist. However, because the board only meets twice monthly, there’s a backlog of cases so they cannot discuss her case. No matter, at the patient’s postoperative visit, the surgeon’s PA refers the patient to the medical oncologist and she is now receiving adjuvant chemotherapy based upon the final pathology.
04:09 – 04:47
Dr. Kevin Halow: Meanwhile, two months after the surgery, the patient goes back to see her primary physician for a routine visit that was already scheduled. To the primary physician’s surprise, she knows nothing of what happened with her patient from the ER visit until now, to include the fact that her patient is in the middle of chemotherapy. She then tries to call the surgeon, and the pulmonologist, and the oncologist, but she cannot get in touch with anyone. All she gets is on hold music and voicemails. This is a 10-minute appointment. How can the patient’s primary physician digest all of this information at once?
04:47 – 05:07
Dr. Kevin Halow: So think about this. Who is the quarterback here? Are we guiding the patient through her care? Or is she just bouncing from specialist to specialist like a bad game of bumper cars? At Clinician Core, care team coordination means that we are all reading the same story and playbook, not just our own individual chapters.
05:07 – 05:27
Dr. Kevin Halow: It means the care team isn’t just a list of names in the chart. It’s a functioning unit that moves in sync on a private network to care for the patient with the physicians at the center of the communication hub. Personalized, private, secure, physician-centric communication. Video, audio, text, and data that now links an entire healthcare team with the physicians at the core.
05:27 – 05:54
Dr. Kevin Halow: Now that we understand the concept, let’s talk about the actual care team. When we talk about collaboration, we usually picture a doctor talking to a nurse. And that is certainly one of the core axes. But communication breakdowns happen everywhere. And include people that the system often ignores. It’s the charge nurse who is responsible for coordinating care. It’s the case manager who knows the patient’s home and family situation.
05:54 – 06:18
Dr. Kevin Halow: It’s the pharmacist working to reconcile the patient’s medications. It’s the primary physician’s medical assistant and scheduler who know what’s been happening with the patient and understand the type of visit that the patient needs. If those people are not on the platform, if they are not communicating with each other and the physician, we are not coordinating. We’re just guessing.
06:18 – 06:54
Dr. Kevin Halow: There’s also one more term I’d like to bring out: interoperability. Interoperability refers to the ability of computer systems or software to exchange and make use of information. However, in the clinical realm, it’s not just about moving data from point A to point B. It’s about creating context. If a nurse sends me a blood pressure reading of 90 over 60 with a pulse of 90, that’s patient data. If he sends me that reading with some clinical history—”Dr. Halow, your patient is two hours post-op and is dizzy. The blood pressure is 90 over 60, the pulse is 90″—that’s information.
06:54 – 07:18
Dr. Kevin Halow: But if he sends me a non-linear video with the same data points, now I can see the whole picture. I am there virtually. I can see the concern on the nurse’s face or the inflection in his voice. He can send me images of the incision site and a view of the patient. Real coordination requires systems that understand context. Now we have context.
07:18 – 07:29
Dr. Kevin Halow: Okay, let’s let’s put this all together. So, remember Mary, our patient with lung cancer who was in the emergency room?
07:29 – 07:55
Dr. Kevin Halow: Let’s take that same scenario and let’s give the care team a private, physician-centric communication network called Clinician Core that can help us guide the patient through her care. When the care team is on the Clinician Core network, everything changes. Our ER doctor initiates a non-linear group video message to the patient’s primary care physician and pulmonologist along with any relevant data.
07:55 – 08:08
Dr. Kevin Halow: This allows for non-linear, personalized communication and coordination on a private group. Following workup by the pulmonologist, the pulmonologist loops in the surgeon on the thread so that he knows about the patient prior to her visit with him.
08:08 – 08:31
Dr. Kevin Halow: Postoperatively, after a successful surgical resection in the hospital, the hospitalist and intensivist help manage the patient. But the surgeon loops them into the group as well. The charge nurse is added to the group because he is responsible for coordinating the patient’s care. The pharmacist is added as well to ensure that her post-op medications are reconciled.
08:31 – 09:05
Dr. Kevin Halow: They also add the case manager and plug the patient into their virtual tumor board that runs an ongoing meeting on the Clinician Core platform about cancer patients. Members of the virtual tumor board review the case and they use AI consultation to find the best chemotherapy regimen. Notes are sent out to all the physicians on the group. The patient sees the oncologist and initiates chemotherapy. Having closed the loop, the ER physician now drops off the group, as does the surgeon after the postoperative visit.
09:05 – 09:27
Dr. Kevin Halow: Meanwhile, the primary physician and pulmonologist loop in their medical assistants and schedulers to arrange follow-up. Since all have been in the loop this entire time, when the patient arrives for outpatient follow-up, not just the data is there, but the context. Everyone is reading from the same playbook and everyone is on the same page.
09:27 – 09:47
Dr. Kevin Halow: The pulmonologist and primary physician seamlessly take over care. The primary physician remains the quarterback. Sound too good to be true? Not really. The technology is already there. At Clinician Core, we’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re just making it run more smoothly. We are putting physicians back at the center of healthcare communication.
09:47 – 10:20
Dr. Kevin Halow: Now, if you’re an administrator listening to this podcast, you might be thinking, “So what? How does this really help my hospital? What’s the value proposition of Clinician Core?” Healthcare utilization in the United States is growing rapidly, driven by increased patient demand, higher insurance coverage, and an aging population. Billions of dollars are wasted in US healthcare on inefficient utilization, with estimates placing waste at nearly 25% of total spending, or 900 billion annually.
10:20 – 10:49
Dr. Kevin Halow: This stems from fragmented communication, lack of coordinated care, administrative complexity, and excessive testing, just to name a few. Right now, we are wasting a staggering amount of effort. If we’re going to keep up, we have to find ways to create an efficiency of effort. If we’re going to solve the complex issues involving healthcare utilization, we must include our most valuable healthcare asset in the decision-making. We must put physicians at the center of healthcare communication. We have to re-engage physicians.
10:49 – 11:15
Dr. Kevin Halow: Let’s face it. There’s a reason that physicians and clinicians use texting regularly, even though it’s not private or HIPAA compliant. It’s because it’s easy. Clinician Core makes healthcare communication easy, but it’s safe, secure, invite-only, HIPAA compliant. Everything automatically deletes after 30 days making nothing permanent on Clinician Core. That’s the value proposition of Clinician Core.
11:15 – 11:36
Dr. Kevin Halow: It re-engages physicians and puts them safely at the center of the healthcare communication hub. It makes our efforts to deliver healthcare more efficient and effective. It optimizes workflows by allowing us to initiate care team collaboration that helps ensure an efficiency of effort that guides patients through their healthcare journey creating better healthcare that is more efficient and effective.
11:36 – 11:58
Dr. Kevin Halow: That is Clinician Core. We hope that you’ve enjoyed this podcast. We have many more issues to cover in these series. If you want to hear more, subscribe to the Clinician Core podcast. You can also check out our website cliniciancore.com and sign up to join our waitlist. The next version of Clinician Core will be going live soon. Finally, you can follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit. I am Dr. Kevin Halow. Thanks for listening.
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