As the saying goes: luck favors the prepared. A command center is where all the complexities and surprises of the healthcare system are grounded.
The global healthcare industry has been hammered left and right by circumstance, but the cloud has a silver lining. Medical professionals have better equipment to tackle complex problems using technology, education, and community resources. The hospital command center is how you take and refine all these tools to a razor’s edge.
What is a hospital command center, and how will it pave the way for the future? We will explain this must-have feature below so you can better help your patients.
A Center for Smart Solutions
Smart solutions is a term that refers to using technology to work smarter, not harder. This term appears in similar areas, such as the smartwatch or the smart house.
A hospital command center works intelligently by becoming a decentralized hub that can accomplish multiple goals simultaneously. Even better, everyone doesn’t need to visit in person for this center to work. Some centers don’t need anyone to be physically present at all! This incredible feat is thanks to modern technology such as chatbots, high-speed internet, and cloud technology.
Creating a hospital command center makes it easier for you to pivot on the spot and respond to challenging variables such as outbreaks or natural disasters.
Related: Pushing the Boundaries of Virtual Care
Types of Command Centers
Which command center best suits your organization? Determining the right type depends on who you’re serving and the challenges you’re looking to overcome.
Incident Response Centers
This type of hospital command center is perhaps the best known due to it necessity in responding to medical emergencies. Hospitals today are designed to have some sort of incident response center to improve speed and accuracy.
Medical professionals are fine-tuning incident response centers thanks to the pandemic to assess and resolve sudden outbreaks.
Security Operations Centers
Hospitals, clinics, and urgent care centers must be safe to attend to patients. While medical staff do their job, security operation centers create peace of mind by keeping an eye out for danger.
With the aid of this operation center, issues like threat detection or sending safety response teams are more accessible than ever.
Building Operation Centers
Safety is paramount in any medical facility. One mistake can be costly when you have so much electrical equipment and hazardous chemicals.
Building operation centers oversee building activity and help dispatch the right people to the right problem. For example, building operation centers implement nurse call systems to resolve emergency events. Likewise, a building operation center can send out vehicles to designated locations in a pinch.
Care Progression Centers
Last but not least, we have care progression centers. These centralized hubs are vital for ensuring operational efficiency is always running high.
Does your hospital have enough beds for incoming patients? If just one detail is out of place, your care progression center will spot it.
Related: The Role of APPs in Telemedicine and Digital Health
Timing is everything in the world of healthcare. We established Clearstep to make managing healthcare easier, and to keep patient and care teams on the path towards better health outcomes.
Operations and the Process
The more hospital command centers you have at your disposal, the better. The operations and process of your facility depend on all of these locations working in tandem.
Today hospitals have a significant need for improved asset management and a more decentralized approach. When you think about it, putting all your eggs in one basket is very risky in healthcare. If all of your command centers are in the same place, the entire operation could crash all at once.
On the other hand, decentralized hubs can still work fairly well even if one or two command centers are temporarily offline.
Related: How AI chat Increases Health Systems’ Clinical Capacity and Builds Brand Loyalty
What to Avoid
With so many benefits to these hospital command centers, it’s hard to think of downsides. As it stands, you should avoid the following mistakes when setting up your new strategy.
Reduce Visual Distraction
The future doesn’t necessarily mean having a ton of bells and whistles. In fact, staring at screens too much can damage your vision and affect your sleep patterns!
You should be thinking of the health of your workers just as much as your patients. Resist the urge to have hospital command centers with a wealth of screens in favor of a less-is-more approach.
Always Have Onboarding for New Technology
Technology changes on a dime, especially with the ability to download new versions or patches on the fly. Giving your team an onboarding process with a new form of software or equipment is essential to keep your command centers efficient.
Avoid Centralized Designs
Centralized designs seem space-efficient and cost-effective, but they hold a huge risk. If your central command hub is compromised, multiple processes will be cut off from the world.
Natural disasters and power outages are just a few of the issues that could compromise a centralized hub. Likewise, try not to solve too many issues at once while establishing your command center. You don’t want to overwhelm your budget or your workers!
Focusing on the Goals
Having just one or two goals you want to focus on is okay. Trying to be too ambitious off the bat may leave you confused or out of money, two issues you definitely don’t need on your plate.
Do you want to boost patient engagement? Consider adding a care progression center that measures and tracks patient activity in the long term. Have you had a lot of dangerous incidents at one of your hospitals these past few months? Consider focusing on establishing a security operation center.
Final Thoughts
Decentralized, specialized hospital command centers are the way of the future. With so many medical challenges heading our way, sticking to traditional methods isn’t enough.
The hospital command center is a resource that combines technology and specialized workers to target problems on a rolling basis. These command centers can focus on building management, care progression, security, or incident management. Decentralizing your command center makes it easier for you to pivot in response to new situations or navigate risks like power outages.
How smart are your medical solutions? Contact us today to establish AI chat solutions for your patient acquisition and engagement strategy.
