Communication issues in your healthcare business negatively impact your employees, clients, patients, and more. Read on for some common communication issues and how to address them.
Table of contents
Poor communication in your healthcare business can contribute to employee burnout and negatively affect patient safety. Plus, it puts your organization at risk of compliance issues.
In this article, we discuss how you can overcome common communication issues while improving efficiency, collaboration, and quality of care.
Key Takeaways
- To reduce the risk of communication issues in your healthcare business, use a centralized platform where your employees can communicate with each other securely in real-time.
- Look for a solution offering features like an in-app chat, forms, and scheduling to optimize communication and collaboration between employees and managers.
- Clear, tailored policies and ongoing employee training also help address communication issues.
Centralize Communication
Challenge
Without a reliable, centralized way for employees to communicate with each other, information is siloed. This slows information sharing, impacting the delivery of quality healthcare services and products. Employees may rely on various informal, insecure methods of communication—putting patient and business data at risk.
Strategy
Choose a single platform for your employees to communicate with—like Connecteam. Create clear communication guidelines for your employees, setting out which platform to use and how to use it. Centralizing communication like this helps employees communicate in a secure environment and always have access to the information and people they need.
💡 Pro Tip:
Use Connecteam’s online team chat for instant and secure communication between every employee in your organization.
Foster compliant communication
Challenge
Communication that doesn’t comply with relevant patient privacy laws can put your
business at risk of costly fines, lawsuits, or even criminal charges. Compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA)—which regulates how these businesses handle, store, and share patient’s sensitive health information—must be a priority for most healthcare businesses.
Strategy
Ensure your employees have access to a HIPAA-compliant communication platform, such as Connecteam. This supports secure messaging and file sharing, controlled access to sensitive information, and access logs to record who accessed certain info and when.
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Learn more about HIPAA compliance and why healthcare businesses need to comply with it in our “What Is HIPAA Compliance?” article.
Streamline shift handovers
Challenge
If employees don’t communicate effectively during handovers—for example, if they rush them or leave out key details—important client or patient information might fall through the cracks. This can affect quality and continuity of care while creating potential safety risks.
Strategy
Create handover checklists for your employees to use. These ensure that employees share essential information with their colleagues and support a consistent approach to handovers.
💡 Pro Tip:
Connecteam lets you create custom digital forms—including checklists—for employees to use during handover to ensure no critical information is missed.
Share regulatory changes and new policies
Challenge
The healthcare industry is heavily regulated, and laws are constantly changing. Employers must communicate these legal and policy updates with employees to ensure their work complies with and follows best practices.
Strategy
Ensure you store all policies and employee information in a central location that employees can access easily from anywhere using their mobile devices. Communicate regulatory updates with employees via a digital communication platform and provide employees with training to stay on top of relevant developments.
💡 Pro Tip:
Connecteam’s company knowledge base is a great way to store and share key policies and important documents with your employees. Plus, you can use Connecteam’s newsfeed to share regulatory and company updates with your entire workforce in just a few clicks.
Simplify issues reporting
Challenge
When employees are sidetracked by healthcare equipment failures, payroll problems, or other issues, they won’t be able to focus fully on the patients or clients they support. This can impact performance and productivity, as well as quality of care.
Strategy
Create an internal ticketing system to deal with organizational issues efficiently. This gives employees a central location to report problems to the right support staff and track their resolution—without spending hours communicating with different departments.
🧠 Did You Know?
Connecteam’s help desk feature lets you create a central hub for employee requests to be reported, assigned to the right people, and resolved quickly.
Don’t forget deskless employees
Challenge
Managing field-based healthcare workers presents unique challenges. Without effective communication, these employees may miss important patient information, run into compliance issues, and feel disconnected.
Strategy
Give employees access to a full-feature communication app on their mobile devices so they’re always connected during work hours. This lets you send important updates to them in real time—plus, they can connect with their colleagues and management for support.
🧠 Did You Know?
Connecteam is designed for in-office and deskless workers. Our mobile app gives users full access to the platform’s communication features, including chat, forms, scheduling, and even employee feedback surveys. There’s also a company employee directory—so employees can access key contacts right from their phones.
Streamline scheduling
Challenge
Many healthcare organizations manage complex schedules involving shift work and employees with different qualifications and varying availability. Poor communication around scheduling can lead to missed shifts, staffing shortages, and employee burnout, plus impact service delivery.
Strategy
Use a digital scheduling tool to create and share schedules with your employees. Tools like Connecteam offer a centralized platform for managing staff availability and sharing real-time schedule changes.
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To help you find the right scheduling solution for your business, we’ve reviewed the 8 Best Healthcare Staff Scheduling Software.
Support real-time incident reporting
Challenge
In a healthcare setting, timely and accurate incident reporting is essential to promoting patient and employee safety. Without an effective way for employees to report incidents, healthcare organizations can’t address problems and their underlying causes.
Strategy
Give employees access to a platform like Connecteam that they can use on their mobile devices to report incidents immediately. Ensure the incident reporting process is standardized—for example, by giving employees a form to fill out to ensure they record essential information, including images and location stamps.
🧠 Did You Know?
Connecteam has a free incident report checklist template you can customize for your healthcare business.
Support Effective Communication With Connecteam
Optimize communication within your healthcare business by using a platform that allows employees to securely chat with each other, access important policies and other documents, and keep track of their schedules.
Connecteam is the best way to manage your healthcare workforce and improve communication. Connecteam’s desktop and mobile apps and full suite of communication features help your employees stay connected, access the most relevant compliance information, and track their shifts.