Anxiety runs high in hospital waiting rooms. Loved ones are gone for what seems like days, and you have no idea what’s going on. Until now.
Milwaukee-based Medical Companion, LLC has designed a line of products to help decrease anxiety and improve communication between medical staff and patient families.
“The company emerged from the personal experience our founder, Dr. Joe Kohli, had in the waiting room as his mother underwent knee surgery,” said Sue Ela, newly named CEO of Medical Companion.
In 2010, Kohli, an orthopedic surgeon with Aurora Health Care, began work on SurgicalCompanion, an application that allows nurses to communicate in real-time with patient families via text messaging or videos.
“Circulating nurses can send pre-programmed or personalized messages, in any language, directly to the family indicating what is taking place and how it’s going,” she said. “Surgeons might even do a short video message for the family directly from the operating room.”
Right now, patients are given a tablet or iPod Touch to use when they check in, and no secure communications are transmitted via the devices so the process is HIPAA compliant, Ela said.
The application is currently in use at four Aurora facilities in the Milwaukee area. The company has seen a lot of interest from hospital systems and is continuing to work on several other related products.
Hospitals using the applications report higher rates of patient satisfaction, because patients and families feel empowered and communicated with.
“Patient satisfaction is always a priority,” Ela said. “Also, the Affordable Care Act ties some reimbursements to patient satisfaction, so economically, it’s even more important.”
