Many teams use Hipchat for work that has a positive impact on the world. Teams within the healthcare industry are a prime example. In any business, communication and collaboration are foundational, but these areas haven’t always been handled efficiently in healthcare organizations.
Whenever we talk with our healthcare customers about what led them to adopt a real-time communication tool, nearly all of their answers center on the same two questions:
- Will this improve our daily workflow?
- Is it secure and compliant?
Obviously there are also other considerations, but it’s a fact that healthcare organizations are at their best when streamlined communication allows for fast-paced collaboration, and information is kept confidential.
Let’s take a closer look at how healthcare organizations improve their flow of communication using Hipchat Data Center.
Improving workflows with responsiveness in real-time
Historically, it hasn’t always been easy for healthcare teams to stay on the same page. Whether the organization is still stuck in pager land or teams are siloed in respective IM platforms – healthcare professionals need a centralized way to communicate in real-time and get things done.
Breaking away from sluggish communication methods like paging and text messaging, Hipchat gives users a secure messaging platform that allows them to push past the dreaded game of phone tag and chat in real-time, whether it be 1:1 or in groups or even starting a video conference with the click of a button. Users can also set up rooms as a means for quick facilitation of necessary information, giving critical conversations like IT support or emergency response their own space.
Rooms aren’t just limited to critical conversations. There are multiple other uses that improve team workflow. For instance, rooms can be used to connect support staff, nurses, and doctors. Using Hipchat, support staff or nurses can provide doctors updates on information such as test results in real-time. Nurses may also be able to quickly send a doctor a message and then quickly take care of a task. Reducing the need for doctors to spend their time checking on records, or finding the nurse to have a discussion. By using Hipchat to centralize the right people together with the right information, the clinic can maximize the use of their staff intelligently and keep collaboration focused and effective.
Integrations abound
When looking for a chat platform, healthcare teams want more than just an IM tool, they want a communication hub. It’s not just about centralizing the right people in real-time, it is about centralizing the right information for those team members to act on. Whether it’s managing open hospital beds, identifying available doctors, or getting access to test results, instant access to information is key in maintaining efficiency.
For this reason, healthcare teams use Hipchat to build a communication layer through rich integrations with other Atlassian tools, or use Hipchat Connect, Hipchat’s API, to integrate with 3rd party or internal systems they need to get work done. These integrations don’t just provide you updates but can allow you to take action directly from Hipchat. Teams can build Hipchat add-ons in any language, and run them on any platform: all they need is for their add-on to talk to Hipchat over open web protocols.
Take for example teams that are using the Jira integration for Hipchat. The integration gives teams the ability to take direct action on Jira issues without having to leave Hipchat, and improve their signal-to-noise ratio through custom notifications. So in times of crisis, teams are able to block out the noise and focus on the updates that will truly help them solve the problem.
Enterprise chat, built for scale
It’s not only about making communication easier and faster for teams, it’s also about making sure that their chat tool is scalable and available at any given time. Hipchat Data Center provides customers with high availability through active-active clustering, ensuring that their chat tool is reliable when they need it the most.
Imagine an emergency response room – it is mission critical for that line of communication to stay open at all times. More than any other industry, healthcare organizations cannot afford any downtime, and Hipchat Data Center enables teams to communicate without interruptions, even in the event of a hardware failure.
In addition, scaling can often be a challenge. There has been a recent surge in the frequency of mergers and acquisitions in the healthcare industry, causing many newly acquired entities to need access to the same tools in a relatively short period of time to centralize communications. Hipchat Data Center allows you to easily scale, both in these situations or just as your organizations grows larger. You can run a small-scale deployment with reduced system requirements or deploy our enterprise-scale deployment to support a larger team, so they’re always prepared for growth, no matter the scope.
Communication that’s secure and compliant
While text messaging has long been the popular form of communication in healthcare, secure messaging platforms are quickly becoming a critical part of the way healthcare companies operate. With data privacy and security legislation such as HIPAA, healthcare organizations can’t legally go on risking data and personally identifiable information (PII) by communicating through vulnerable messaging platforms. With Hipchat Data Center, our clients get an on-premise tool with holistic administrative controls, enabling them to meet all regulatory and compliance standards.
They’re also given full control of features like integration governance, permissions for deleting chat history, and guest access. With guest access, Hipchat can serve healthcare organizations both internally and externally. In fact, many of our healthcare customers already use Hipchat for communication with their facilities in addition to inter-office communication. You can bring clients, vendors and other third parties into group chats and control what’s visible. Similarly, there’s flexible control over user management so teams are able to integrate with existing systems and infrastructure. Hipchat Data Center allows teams to bring in users either via SAML 2.0, through native authentication or directories such as LDAP and Crowd.
What’s on the horizon
Ever greater efficiency will always be top of mind for healthcare organizations, and a critical driver is communication. With the continued integration of technology into the industry to streamline processes, teams need their chat tool to go above and beyond. With Hipchat Data Center, healthcare teams have the opportunity to communicate in real-time, maximize their daily workflow, and meet all compliance and regulation standards – all under the roof of a centralized hub for collaboration.