Diagnostic Management Teams in Multi-Hospital Health Systems

I have posted two notes recently about diagnostic management teams (DMTs) (see: A Major Change Now Occurring in Both Clinical Pathology and Anatomic Pathology; DMTs as an Example of a Team Approach to Clinical Lab Diagnostics). Generally speaking, DMTs have usually been deployed in a single hospital with the diseases covered by the team limited to the special expertise of that team. With such a scenario, communication among the DMT members does not pose much of a challenge, given that all of the team personnel work in close proximity.I think that the next major hurdle relating to the broader adoption of DMTs is their deployment across all of the hospitals within a large system. System-wide DMTS will definitely be an attractive target for the leadership of such large systems because of the major goals of DMTs: reduce the number of incorrect diagnoses, reduce the number of erroneous lab orders, particularly for expensive tests, reduce the length-of-stay for complex patients, and increase patient satisfaction. However, system-wide DMTs pose a new challenge not seen within a single hospital, which is to say communication among team members who are physically separated.Modern IT does provide solutions for communication across physical space -- multi-party video conferencing using apps likeSkype andBlueJeans. One additional feature available with these apps is the option to record and archive the discussions of the DMT for later reference and quality control purposes.Th...
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