August 2025
A new secure notification service from Health IT is reducing the time providers spend on the phone and increasing patient safety. Critical action values (CAV) in the lab are results that indicate a life-threatening or significantly abnormal condition requiring immediate medical attention. Prompt communication of these results to physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants ensures that urgent interventions can be initiated without delay. Timely reporting minimizes risks to patient safety and supports rapid decision making for optimal clinical outcomes.
Push notifications allow critical action values to be sent directly to caregivers in real time, ensuring rapid awareness without pulling them away from patient care to answer a phone. These are closed-loop push notifications where the recipient has to confirm receipt, which sends back an automated message to acknowledge and close the loop. This approach also benefits lab staff, who can remain focused on testing, which could contribute to faster turnaround times for all specimens.
In the spring, providers in all inpatient and emergency department (ED) locations began receiving CAV push notifications. Because fewer CAVs require phone calls, the calls that do remain can be addressed more quickly, further improving patient safety and efficiency. Over 30 days in June and July, 11,413 push notifications were sent. If those notifications had been phone calls (assuming 5 minutes per call), the push notifications saved over 46K minutes or 32 days in people time across the enterprise.
