When I arrived at NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens nearly one year ago to assume the position of CEO, the smart TVs available to all patients were one of the first things that caught my attention. A sophisticated system like this, I thought, tells people who come here for their healthcare that we are a hospital of choice, with top technology for improving patient experience. The fact that we can customize this equipment to communicate the exact information we want is nothing short of remarkable. I soon learned that what started as an upgrade of our hospital’s TV service evolved into something much more comprehensive.

An Individualized Approach
The advent of these smart TVs in patient rooms ushered in the dawning of telehealth at NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens, allowing the hospital to expand its educational abilities and tailor them to each patient according to their individual needs. This interactive healthcare system now exists in the Queens Cancer Center and in several departments throughout the hospital, including perioperative, labor and delivery, mother and baby, the regular medical-surgical unit, and the extended observation unit.

When NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens began its TV-replacement journey, it had been using an analog, low-definition satellite TV feed and distributing it to old, CRT-style (“tube”) televisions in patient rooms. The quality was poor, unreliable and a source of complaints from patients and their families. Today, the hospital has a network of about 250 high-definition smart TVs integrated to communicate over the facility’s existing coaxial cable infrastructure. The new TVs run patient-engagement software from one of the hospital’s vendor partners, creating a hotel-style environment for patients. The hospital can now offer patients important educational information while continually enhancing the patient experience through new technology.

The vendor also has programmed an intuitive, tiled home screen on each of the TVs that gives users access to TV content; hospital information, such as pharmacy hours; a set of programmable preferences; and a catalog of patient education. These smart TVs interface with the hospital’s admission, discharge and transfer system to identify who is in each room. They communicate back and forth with nurses’ station computers, enabling staff to assign appropriate content to each patient and monitor whether they watch it. The system features a library of more than 500 videos in English and Spanish, as well as with closed captions.

One of the highlights of this new TV system is its flexibility in allowing NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens to produce its own videos catering to patients. In the past, information would be given to patients as they were leaving the hospital. With the new interactive system, staff can start educating patients much earlier. We can assign videos based on their prognosis, including content that helps reinforce prescribed treatment or medications. There are even videos to help anxious patients relax.

Improved Care
NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens’ nursing staff members have embraced the interactive system, recognizing its ability to assist with delivering improved care to more patients. The hospital’s HCAHPS satisfaction scores have already begun to advance since the smart TVs were implemented in fall 2020, with early indications demonstrating that patients use and enjoy the new system, and nurses know that people are getting the health education they need. For instance, the organization had its highest score in the past two years on six of the 10 inpatient questions/domains. Ultimately, nurses can spend more time treating patients and less time reviewing the important information now offered through the system.

NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens has already begun making further improvements to the smart TV system. Plans are underway to integrate it with the hospital’s EHR to allow nurses to select and assign patient videos directly from the patient’s electronic record, making the process faster and more convenient for the nursing staff.

Merging Technology With a Human Touch
In its ongoing quest to become a truly person-centered healthcare facility, NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens recently has embarked on a journey to become Planetree-certified. A patient founded the Planetree healthcare model in 1978 as a way of restoring a greater sense of compassion and partnership in the caregiving process. The organization is committed to enhancing healthcare from the patient’s perspective. Delivering person-centered care involves caring for patients beyond their condition and tailoring the hospital’s service to suit patients’ individual needs. It’s about respecting them and their individual priorities and collaborating with them to determine the best course of action in their treatment.

To achieve Planetree certification, NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens will strive to marry new technology with the human touch in everything it does. The system will work to engage staff to become patient advocates: to put themselves in the patient’s shoes and employ more empathy and sensitivity in all they do.

—Adapted from “Tailored Technology,” Healthcare Executive, Neil J. Moore, FACHE, CEO, NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens

How Digital Health Lays the Groundwork for Future Healthcare Strategy

Baptist Health is one of many health systems using digital health to improve its ICU services and connect care providers throughout the Arkansas-based 11-hospital network, improving care at the bedside and enabling small, rural hospitals to reduce transfers and care for more patients. Executives say the platform, which has been in use for roughly 14 years, allows them to coordinate care from the main hospitals in Little Rock and give outlying hospitals with fewer resources the support they need.

As the healthcare industry moves toward the concept of hospitalizing the sickest patients, it’s turning the concept of remote patient monitoring around. Telemedicine platforms and digital health tools are being deployed within the hospital setting to capture more patient data and send it directly to who most needs it, no matter where that care team member is located. That may be the nurse down the hall at a central station who’s keeping track of all the patients in a specific area, or the hospitalist in Little Rock assigned to watch patients in a small hospital a few hundred miles away.

While technology was trained on caring for infected patients and reducing the chances of exposure for care teams, forward-thinking health systems were eyeing strategies that took them beyond the pandemic, where digital health would be used inside the hospital to refine and direct care to where it would be most needed.

That requires a different way of thinking, and one that is challenging health system leaders to recognize that tomorrow’s hospital will be considerably different. It will involve more integration, as services are coordinated through digital health channels, and an understanding of how nurses and doctors can be redeployed to improve care management.

For now, the health system is focusing on the inpatient network. This includes coordinating care with the smaller, more remote hospitals in their network, where ICUs are either small or nonexistent and a patient transfer to a larger hospital might take dozens of phone calls. Linking to the larger hospitals in and around Little Rock enables those small hospitals to expand their ICU capabilities, even create ICU beds where they didn’t have any, and care for more patients, keeping them closer to home and their families instead of shipping them off somewhere distant.

In some cases, Baptist Health is using telemedicine carts to manage care, and many rooms are being equipped with tablets that synch with the health system’s Epic EHR, allowing not only providers to connect with the patient record but giving patients a means of connecting with friends and family, or for those who need interpreters.

The platform has also allowed Baptist Health to expand the reach of its specialists, giving those smaller hospitals access to pulmonologists, infectious disease and wound care experts, and lactation consultants with more services on the way.

Health systems need to reimagine how care is delivered, expanding the platform to cover patients no matter where they need that care, and offering services that interact with the communities they serve. The hospital may sit at the geographical center of that platform, but it will no longer be where everyone goes to get care.

—Adapted from “How Digital Health Lays the Groundwork for Future Healthcare Strategy,” HealthLeaders, by Eric Wicklund, Feb. 1, 2022.