Miscommunication Kills. Here's What Pulsara's CEO is Doing About That [Podcast]

Medical errors in healthcare kill about 400,000 people per year secondary to medical error.

On top of that, you have 10,000 serious medical complications every single day, which affects 1 in 5 Americans.

And, 80% of these medical errors are due to miscommunication.

According to Dr. James Woodson, Founder and CEO of Pulsara, these facts are what drove him to transition from practicing medicine full time to focusing on making the Pulsara platform a reality. 

"A lot of our staff still use pagers," Dr. Woodson said in a new podcast episode hosted by Medic2Medic. "But 50% of all pages go to the wrong person in acute scenarios. That's a massive source of miscommunication that causes complications and delays. And, in many places in the U.S. we don't have systems in place to remedy in real time when those call lists are wrong."

This example is one in a long list Dr. Woodson has seen over the course of his career as an Emergency Physician that can cause significant harm. Another discussed in the episode was the grave impact of delays in treatment. When someone is suffering a Large Vessel Occlusion stroke, for example, they lose 2 million brain cells EVERY MINUTE. 

"So imagine you have a facility where their goal treatment time for LVO is 45 minutes, and they get treatment exactly in that 45 minute window. But it could have been and should have been 20 minutes [had their communication been more effective], how many neurons just died?" Dr. Woodson asked. "It can truly mean the difference between being in a nursing home and going to your grandkids' softball game." 

Beyond these massive patient impacts, Dr. Woodson also states that we don't talk about value-based healthcare enough. Where value = quality/cost, we as clinicians need to provide increased quality of care (by reducing treatment times to impact patient outcomes) and decrease costs (including false activations, longer EMS turn around times, etc). One way of doing this is to eliminate archaic technologies and replace them with modern ones that actually work.

"If we can reduce our technologies by consolidating them in the prehospital space, we can improve quality of care and decrease cost at which we deliver that care," said Dr. Woodson. 

Other costs of miscommunication in healthcare include:

Malpractice: 30% of all malpractice claims can be attributed to miscommunication

Revenue: Hospitals waste 2% of all revenues on miscommunciation. 

Personnel:

• Increased employee turnover
• Poor decision making
• Conflict in the work place
• Increased stress and job dissatisfaction

"Uniting team members, especially those that don't work for the same healthcare entity, is critically important," Dr. Woodson explained. "And, in the case of EMS, thinking of them as simply a method of arrival is the wrong approach. They are critical team members that are part of the patient's care team. We need to close that loop with EMS and provide them feedback after the case, so we can improve our systems in real time, to continue to affect patient care."

Pulsara is a regional communication network where any hospital and any EMS agency can communicate about any patient regardless of where they are. 

Learn more about Dr. Woodson's journey founding Pulsara right here.