“HEY! WHAT’S YOUR FAX NUMBER?”
To grab your attention on this article right from the get-go, here is a really thrilling quote from a really thrilling government report. The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) thrillingly stated in their 2019 Emergency Communications Governance Report that:
“Interoperability and communication throughout local, regional, state, and federal levels, is imperative to safety and National Security. A strong infrastructure of communications, coordination capabilities, and decision-making is critical to effective and efficient government.”
If you’re still awake I’ll paraphrase: Government and healthcare, aka the Public Service and Private Health industries, have two core functions: Keeping us safe and keeping us healthy. In order to do that, the tens of thousands of independent organizations that make up these sectors, from out-patient care facilities to local sheriff’s departments, need constant and clear communication with each other.
Whether it’s hospitals talking to county health departments, fire stations talking to city emergency managers, or mayoral offices talking with the state public works department, millions of these conversations are happening every day and 99% of all of these conversations are happening over the most ineffective and slowest communication medium: email.
A Messy Hodgepodge of Blurred Lines
The “strong infrastructure of communication” mentioned by CISA in their annual report is kind of like the elusive Bigfoot, sorry, North American Great Ape, we hear about it all the time, but never see (except I have video evidence that Bigfoot actually does exist). The current communication infrastructure for our public service and private health folks looks more like the picture below.
Our communication infrastructure should be a pristine F1 car, but instead it looks like a 1982 Ford Bronco being held together with duct-taped and chewing gum. Not exactly the sophisticated network of real-time secure communication we as the public were hoping for.
It’s a badly stitched together patchwork of fax machines, text messages, long chain emails, busy phone lines, hundreds of apps, and yes, even snail mail. This communication network is unorganized, chaotic, and informal. There’s zero consistency and zero homogeneity.
To compound the problem, cross-jurisdictional (fancy word combination describing people that are “the others”) contact information is often missing or out of date. Many of these government and hospital organizations rely on printed out contact directories that are pinned to a bulletin board near the break room where Diane from accounting has also posted a sign up sheet for early morning knitting classes for elderly cats. If a town’s sheriff needs to get a hold of the local hospital or county emergency manager, they’re most likely googling phone numbers.
We have received your request
The meme below is from the ever funny TV show, Community. Annie, the self-starting do-gooder who is in charge of making her community college campus better for everyone, is trying to get a bulletin board re-hung in the cafeteria. In order to do this, she has to navigate an unknown world of janitorial bureaucracy and administrative red tape.
The best comedy parodies reality. Just like the fictional community college campus above, the public service and private health sectors suffer from similar obstacles. Oftentimes a simple approval or request for information has to go through numerous levels of authority or feedback, with email being the main channel of communication.
The cost of this inefficient communication infrastructure is enormous. It’s the largest contributor to decreased productivity, delays task completion by as much as 20%, and costs the U.S. taxpayer close to $100 billion every year. But there’s also a far greater price that is being paid.
The true cost of bad communication
Jose Manuel Gomez was a recently retired 71 year old who lived just outside of San Diego with his wife. Two months into the Covid pandemic, Jose complained of trouble breathing, nausea, and headaches. The symptoms got so bad that his family took him to the regional medical center where he was diagnosed with Covid-19.
At the time, the regional medical center was overrun with dozens of Covid patients, like Jose, in addition to their daily normal intake. They had people sitting in hallways waiting for available beds to open up. To alleviate the pressure, the nursing staff and doctors called the next closest hospital to inquire about their availability, only to find out that hospital was also beyond max capacity.
The medical center’s CEO placed a call to California’s Director of Emergency Medical Services asking for help. The director explained he was essentially powerless and his only advice was to have the staff of the regional medical center begin calling hospitals located further away to check on their bed availability.
No state-wide directory of hospital staff existed for them to use as a call sheet. So, the doctors and nurses treating Jose and others began googling phone numbers of other hospitals. Precious time was wasted blindly dialing in hopes of reaching the right people. When staff eventually did contact the right people, they would swap cell phone numbers and text each other with updates regarding bed availability.
Twenty hours after starting the available bed search for Jose, the regional medical staff found a hospital three hours away that had the needed bed and ventilator. Jose’s family was elated. The hospital rushed Jose outside to a waiting ambulance and started the journey, but his O2 levels had already dropped to critical levels several hours prior. Jose died en route.
Floating around in the world was the critical information that there was an available hospital bed that could have saved Jose’s life. The problem is that the people who needed that information didn’t have access to it. That’s the real cost of an unorganized communication infrastructure.
“In The Midst of Chaos, There Is Also Opportunity.”
We started IRIS Systems because the people who are responsible for keeping us safe and healthy don’t talk with each other very well or share critical information with each other seamlessly. This results in information silos that cause potentially life-saving decisions to be made without the input of real-time data (e.g. there’s an open hospital bed several hours away for a dying patient, send them on over.)
IRIS systems is working to bridge this communication divide that exists across government and healthcare jurisdictions. We want to make communicating and collaborating with your colleagues and peers in external organizations as simple as a mouse click. And we’ve done just that.
We conducted a closed trial of our MVP (MVP is software talk for the most basic version of a new software) with 18 different government organizations who typically interact with each other over email.
When we compared this trial period to the same period from the previous year we discovered the following:
Average email inbox reduction of 55%
Office workers spend 3.5 hours a day sifting through hundreds of emails. Ambiguous information, spam, duplicates, and chain emails eat away at your time. Fewer emails means more efficiency.
15x faster response time
Receiving an email response roughly takes 30 minutes. When using our platform, users had an average response time of two minutes. Faster response times equals faster results.
1.97 hours saved in a working day
The average office worker spends 30% of their day reading and answering emails. Less time spent searching through the noise means you have more time to focus on the important things.
So what’s the take away?
Our government and healthcare sectors need to adopt novel technologies to improve their communication and collaboration. This is vital to our health and safety as a population. Thankfully, our elected officials are just starting to see the power of cloud technology.
If you work in government or healthcare, we want to talk to you. We’ll show you how our platform can streamline communication, increase collaboration, save money, and empower your workforce. Send us a message to learn more.
If you’re not in government or healthcare, please get elected to a government position or climb the healthcare corporate ladder as soon as you can and then reach out to us. It’s not too much to ask, we don’t think.
So, to close: (insert personal motivation catch phrase here…something like Buzz Lightyear’s “To infinity, and beyond ” but without the copyright infringement.)
