Hope Johnson, the administrator of Perioperative Services at Lehigh Valley Health Network, has been with the eight-hospital health system for nearly 15 years. As such, she has watched and been a part of Lehigh Valley’s technological transformation.

“It’s crazy,” she told MobiHealthNews. “Like every project we do now involves technology, whether it’s security, HIPAA,” or the system’s recent program to improve patient and family communications during operations.

Johnson, along with her colleague Nadine Opstbaum, the director of Information Services, spearheaded Lehigh Valley’s 2017 operating room communications project. The two will be sitting down to talk about their experience at HIMSS21 this August.

Prior to the project, there was no good way to communicate with a surgical patient’s family during the procedure to share updates, according to Johnson.

“Really there was nothing,” she said. “Family members would be in the waiting room and we would just go out and speak with them with the doctor [after the procedure]. We didn’t make calls, we didn’t text, we didn’t use big board communication. Yeah no, we had nothing. We went from zero to one hundred.”

Knowing there had to be a better way, Johnson and Opstbaum began seeking out different operating room communication apps and conducting trial runs. Eventually, they landed on Vocera’s Ease app, primarily because it allows nurses to send personal messages to family members.

“A lot of the systems out there use your electronic medical records to kind of push information,” Johnson said. “So when I hit ‘surgery starting’ on Epic, it would then drive a message that says ‘surgery started,’ but it’s generic and it’s only the milestones. This just adds personability to it, and that was really one of the main reasons that we chose this company over others.”

To use the app, patients indicate which family members or loved ones they want to receive updates while they’re in surgery. From there, they can download it to receive messages from the OR nurse throughout the procedure.

Nurses can send a variety of messages, from text to pictures and videos, but family members can only respond with emoji to make sure nurses don’t get distracted while caring for the patient.

Lehigh Valley rolled out the app slowly at first. It started with the robotics surgery teams at just a few of the system’s campuses before eventually spreading across the network and into different clinical areas.

“The way that we did it in targeting it slowly to work out any kinks was probably the best,” Johnson said. “We started with our robotics team, so that team in the OR is used to technology. They’re used to new things. They’re not afraid.”

Now, in addition to using the app in the operating room, Lehigh Valley uses it in its post-anesthesia care units, intensive care units and catheterization laboratories.

For patients’ family members, the app gives them peace of mind while their loved one undergoes a procedure, Johnson said. But for Lehigh Valley, the benefits are threefold.

“I think it just shows that we are keeping up with technology, right?” she said. “People text all the time. It’s kind of silly that we wouldn’t be able to stay wired to each other. And then it just kind of shows that we’re trying to put patient satisfaction ahead of everything else.

“We were the only one in our geographic area with this. So our major competitor was not going to be able to get the app because of an agreement we entered into with the company. I think that was important, because I know they wanted it, and it sets us apart from other people.”

Johnson and Opstbaum will be presenting their session, titled “Fostering Innovation With Real-Time Communications” at HIMSS21. It is scheduled for Tuesday, August 10, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Alliance 315 at Caesars.