Communication is important no matter what industry you are in, from business and government to healthcare, education, and oil and gas. Without effective communication, you could say not much gets done. Staff are on their own with no cohesiveness to their day or to the company they are working for. The results of lack of effective communication can be devastating — it can even put your company out of business.

Symtech Solutions was founded in 1982 with the goal of helping improve communication in the healthcare industry. Based in Pennsylvania, we serve a wide area, including New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia. We offer life safety communication and rapid response monitoring systems that not only help improve communication in your healthcare facility, but also improve patient care and even can help save lives.

Whiteboards in hospitals have been around for a very long time. Recently, the use of digital whiteboards for healthcare facilities has skyrocketed due to their ease of use and convenience. Plus, the use of digital hospital boards have eliminated many common problems found with traditional dry erase boards that have made healthcare facilities take the plunge and invest in them to improve staff communication and patient care. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the common problems that digital hospital whiteboards have helped eliminate with regular commonplace dry erase boards. Contact Symtech Solutions to get started today!

Missing Dry Erase Markers

With dry erase boards, you have to use dry erase markers to write on them. Without a dry erase marker, the board itself is pretty much useless. The problem with dry erase markers is the problem with regular pens: people put them in their pocket, set them down somewhere and then they end up getting lost, or they just fall on the floor and get kicked under furniture. Plus, how many times have you gone to use a dry erase marker and it didn’t work — probably because someone left the cap off? With digital healthcare whiteboards, most are touchscreen or you can use a keyboard to enter information from a computer elsewhere, saving you the hassle of trying to find a marker.

Missing Important Information

Another problem with regular whiteboards is that providers fail to provide pertinent information to others about the patient. This is not due to any fault of their own; it’s just that the doctor or nurse on duty forgot to add it because it’s common knowledge to them. Thus, when the next shift shows up, this information may require a phone call to the provider while they are off duty. With digital whiteboards, there are pre-programmed fields that help providers remember to fill in the information for others who follow them so that everyone has the same patient information without having to chase down the information.

Haphazard Information

A regular whiteboard is an empty slate per se. You can write on it whatever you want. In the past, a whiteboard was empty with no fields provided, so nurses and doctors would write notes in random places with no organization to them. Plus, depending on who began the whiteboard, lines could be slanted or missing, leaving information skewed. Digital hospital whiteboards are able to standardize the layout of every whiteboard in your facility, making patient information easy to find as providers get used to where to find it. This speeds up processes as time is not wasted in searching for information and scanning boards. Plus, information is not missed either because while the information was present, a provider could not find that information.

No One Updating the Board

Let’s face it, working in a hospital, emergency room, assisted living facility, or a doctor’s office can be hectic. Emergencies can happen on a dime, you get busy, and before you know it, your shift is up. You finish up your patients and then rush off to your daughter’s school recital — without having updated the whiteboard. Normally, this is not a problem, but no one else updated it either. This means providers will have to call you or a teammate in order to get the information they need. With a digital whiteboard, anyone can seamlessly update information in real time as something changes. By updating your digital whiteboards on a routine basis, patient information will always be current, and no one has to try and remember at the end of a hectic shift.

No One Can Read the Information

Doctors are notorious for having bad handwriting. Well, their handwriting does not improve using a whiteboard. Oftentimes, whiteboard information can be smudged as well, leaving the entire note missing key components of information. This can leave other practitioners frustrated, as well as spending more time than needed trying to decipher important information that may be needed quickly. This was one of the biggest reasons digital whiteboards began to be invented. After all, having the wrong information or no information at all can be detrimental when it comes to patient care, and in this day and age, is truly unacceptable.

With digital healthcare whiteboards, information is in an easy to read format that is often enlarged as well so providers can access what they need to know quickly. In addition, patients can see this information as well, so they don’t have to wait for answers from a healthcare professional. Some digital whiteboards can even display information in other languages, such as Spanish and Chinese, making it easy for the patient and their family to see and read. This results in higher patient satisfaction scores, but, more importantly, it makes a real difference in the lives of the patients and their families in your healthcare facility.

Symtech Solutions is passionate about offering the best life safety communication systems and rapid response monitoring systems for your healthcare facility. We serve national and regional medical centers, local hospitals, nursing homes, and more with these systems that can revolutionize how you offer patient care. From nurse call and wander management systems to infant security and telehealth solutions, we hope to take your healthcare facility to the next level.

Digital whiteboards can streamline communication within your healthcare facility. As you can see from the common communication problems listed above that digital whiteboards solve, your staff can expedite customer service, help decrease the amount of miscommunications, and cut down on supporting and monotonous tasks that are necessary, but that aren’t directly related to patient care. In sum, healthcare whiteboards can help solve a lot of communication problems and show areas where inefficiencies exist so you can focus on those.

Our team has helped hundreds of healthcare facilities design, implement, and then service life safety communication and rapid response systems for your healthcare facility. We also specialize in the upgrading of these systems, including upgrading to wireless systems, for your healthcare facility. We offer 24/7 service support, so if you have a question or need a technician to come out and troubleshoot your nurse call, or temperature sensing kiosk, we are more than happy to answer that call.

For your digital whiteboard solution or for any of our other life safety communication systems, give us a call today!