What Real‑Time Communication Looks Like in Hospitals

Effective communication is a critical determinant of patient safety and operational efficiency in hospitals. Whether in responding to an emergency, coordinating patient care, or ensuring smooth handoffs between shifts, delays in communication can lead to costly errors that risk patient safety and disrupt workflows. 

Establishing real-time communication systems and tools is critical for ensuring that clinical teams can efficiently and directly transmit accurate information to providers in the fastest way possible.

In this article, we’ll share practical examples of real-time communication in hospitals, the benefits of using a unified clinical communications platform, and how to implement real-time communication for the best outcomes. 

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Why Real‑Time Communication Matters in Hospitals

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The high cost of miscommunication

The biggest risk of miscommunication is incomplete or delayed information. For physicians, waiting on critical information can slow down treatment plans or lead to repeated tests and procedures. In other instances, a nurse might not receive an update on a patient’s lab results in a timely manner, forcing them to make decisions without an understanding of the patient’s complete clinical picture. 

Hospitals also face significant strain from the volume of switchboard communications. Many hospitals use switchboards to manage communications, often fielding thousands of calls daily. These calls are both external and internal, with the internal calls including manual call routing and staff paging across the hospital. This manual, fragmented system can create delays, cause misrouted calls, and add administrative burden to an already busy clinical team.

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Benefits of real‑time communication

Real-time communication in hospitals isn’t just about speed – it’s also about accuracy and completeness to facilitate informed decision-making for better delivery of patient care. Effective real-time communication reduces friction and improves clinical readiness.

Ensuring the right information reaches the right people at the right time enables hospitals to foster greater efficiency among staff and deliver safer, more timely care.

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Meeting clinician expectations

Clinical communication tools that offer secure messaging, coordinated care, and integrated on-call management make real-time communication possible. 

But the real value only comes when these tools work seamlessly with existing systems. Integrations, training, and cultural buy-in are just as important as the technology itself. When physicians trust the system and know they can rely on it to make their jobs more efficient, real-time communication becomes part of the team’s everyday workflow.

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Real‑Life Examples of Real‑Time Communication in Hospitals

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Code activations and emergency response

Code team activations represent one of the most essential applications of real-time communication in healthcare. In emergency situations, whether Code Blue or Code STEMI activations, the on-call team and specialists need to be mobilized quickly. 

A unified clinical communications platform can eliminate delays and miscommunication by alerting the right people instantly. 

For example, Hypercare sends real-time alerts to the on-call response team, ensuring everyone is notified directly. It also has automatic escalations – if a team member doesn’t respond quickly, the alert escalates the notification to other channels such as SMS and phone calls, ensuring that the provider gets the message and reducing activation delays.

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Secure messaging in daily care

In a traditional hospital setting, information can move slowly, whether through pagers, hallway conversations, or paper notes. 

Secure messaging solves this by providing an instant, two-way channel to share sensitive lab results, messages, imaging, and diagnostics. 

For specialist consults, real-time messaging capabilities enable faster response times, leading to quicker diagnosis and treatment, improved coordination across teams, and accelerated delivery of patient care. 

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Interdepartmental coordination and integration

Interdepartmental coordination remains one of the most pressing communication challenges in hospitals.

Without an effective on-call management solution, clinicians are forced to manually track down the right providers, creating workflow friction and delaying response times.

Real-time communication tools address this challenge by eliminating barriers between departments and enabling seamless collaboration across the entire care team. With the ability to instantly identify and contact the on-call team, clinicians can intervene more quickly and with greater confidence.  

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Implementing Real‑Time Communication in Hospitals: Strategy and Best Practices

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1. Assess existing workflows and infrastructure

A critical first step would be to review your hospital’s current communication methods to identify gaps. 

For example, if your hospital is overwhelmed with switchboard calls, you may find that it’s led to communication gaps including:

• Missed or misrouted calls
• Long hold times 
• Multistep activation processes 
• Lack of confirmation of calls received 
• Contacting the wrong person on-call 

These communication gaps can lead to significant delays in patient care. To improve communication workflows, you would likely want a secure messaging tool that can ease the burden of finding and contacting the right providers in a timely manner. 

This is just one example of a communication gap in your organization’s workflow. Additional gaps you might identify include managing clinical schedules, communicating on-call schedules in real-time, or mobilizing hospital emergency teams quickly. 

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2. Choose the right platform

Once you’ve identified how your hospital’s real-time communication could improve, choose a clinical communications platform that addresses those gaps. 

Evaluate different platforms to understand how their features align with your needs. Look for features like secure messaging, on-call coordination, and code team activation for the most comprehensive solution, like Hypercare.

It’s also imperative to assess the platform’s functionality and usability. Consider everything from the platform’s interface to the user experience, and even customer support or training options. These factors can increase the likelihood that the platform will seamlessly integrate with physicians’ existing workflows. 

Additionally, your clinical communications platform should include integrated solutions, including connecting with scheduling management, EHR, monitors and alarms, and other information systems such as lab and radiology. 

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3. Change management and training

The true impact of any technology depends on its successful acceptance and use within daily clinical practice. Getting healthcare teams to adopt a clinical communications platform requires careful planning and a strategic rollout.

After getting leadership support and buy-in, clinicians need clear guidelines about how the new platform will directly benefit patient care and improve their workflows. 

There are a couple of rollout methods to consider. A phased implementation approach helps ensure a smooth transition, preventing the hospital from being overwhelmed by a system-wide change all at once.

In other instances, you may consider introducing the platform to all departments at the same time to avoid fragmentation and miscommunication. In either instance, providing plenty of training opportunities is critical to ensure clinical teams get comfortable integrating new tools into their existing setup. 

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4. Measure and iterate

After implementing your new clinical communications platform, identify the KPIs you want to measure for success.

Key metrics can include: 

• Response times: Measure how quickly teams acknowledge and respond to alerts or code activations.
• Communication failures: With secure messaging, real-time updates, and closed-loop communication, the risk of communication failures such as misrouted calls, lack of follow-ups, and missed handoffs should decrease. 
• Message delivery: Track the delivery of priority messages to see how quickly they’re acknowledged and better understand the impact on care delivery.
• Time savings: Gather clinician feedback to understand how much time they’re saving from reduced administrative tasks or manual communication. 
• Adoption rates: Measure the usage data across departments and survey clinical teams to understand how well they’ve integrated the platform into their workflows. 

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Case Studies: Real-Time Communication Examples in Hospitals

Below are examples of real-time communication in hospitals, and how Hypercare helped these organizations improve their clinical communications. 

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Mile Bluff Medical Center

Mile Bluff Medical Center is a small, rural hospital in Wisconsin that needed a modernized communications infrastructure. With its previous system, on-call schedules were buried in the intranet, coordination depended on manual calls to the switchboard, and secure messaging across departments was virtually non-existent. Delays during critical moments became frequent, impacting patient outcomes. 

After implementing Hypercare for real-time scheduling, messaging, and surgical activation workflows across the organization, Mile Bluff’s activation time for urgent and emergency surgeries dropped from 20-30 minutes to just five seconds. Additionally, over 70,000 secure messages were sent in the first six months.

“The system eliminated scut work so we could focus on patients,” says Randall Brandt, PA & IT Provider Liaison at Mile Bluff Medical Center. “We no longer waste time figuring out who to call; Hypercare tells us instantly.” 

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Sault Area Hospital

Sault Area Hospital (SAH) sought to modernize and improve how physicians coordinate and communicate in its fast-paced clinical environment. The hospital had an outdated system for physician scheduling and needed real-time visibility into who was on call for faster, easier coordination. 

After setting up Hypercare’s real-time clinical communication platform, the SAH clinical team began using it as the primary communication tool for consults, preferring secure messaging over phone calls. Physicians also rely on Hypercare’s live directory – a full staff directory that includes on-call team members – reducing reliance on switchboard operators.

“Hypercare has made a real difference in how we communicate during consults,” Dr. Derek Garniss, CMIO at SAH. “Being able to securely message and share images and results right from my phone has made my workflow significantly more efficient.” 

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Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre and Health Sciences North

Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) in Ontario, Canada, a leading regional hospital, sought to enhance its emergency response capabilities across multiple critical scenarios, including Code STEMI, and other urgent code team activations.

RVH relied on a traditional switchboard system to manually page interventional cardiology and cath lab teams. This process was prone to delays, as switchboard operators had to locate the correct on-call providers, page them, and wait for a response. Additionally, securely transmitting ECGs to interventional cardiologists was difficult, impeding rapid decision-making.

RVH implemented Hypercare to streamline communication, reduce emergency code activation delays, and implement a real-time, automated emergency response system to improve patient outcomes. Hypercare has significantly strengthened the hospital’s ability to coordinate life-saving interventions across multiple departments.

“Activating a STEMI is now seamless,” says Dr. Mark Kotowycz, Interventional Cardiologist & Medical Director, Cardiac Intervention Unit, RVH. “We no longer wait for pages to be returned—the entire team is alerted instantly. The faster we mobilize, the sooner we can open the artery, directly improving patient outcomes.” 

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Conclusion

In today’s healthcare environment, unified, real-time communication is essential for ensuring patient safety, optimizing clinical efficiency, and enabling seamless, coordinated care. 

When hospitals deploy effective tools for secure messaging, code activations and interdepartmental coordination, both response times and the quality of patient care are significantly improved.

Learn more about implementing a real-time communications platform at your hospital with Hypercare.