Healthcare facilities are heavily regulated environments. From electronic health records to how fire doors in a hospital need to be installed, many different organizations and government agencies regulate the healthcare industry.

Medical alarms are one aspect of healthcare that is heavily standardized. The IV pump will “ding” if a tube becomes kinked. And because of movies with melodramatic scenes in the hospital, most people are aware of the heartbeat in the background beeping over the actors’ voices.

What patients, healthcare providers and family members may not realize is all alarms are required to meet an international standard. The international standard for medical electrical equipment (IEC 60601-1-8) from the International Standards Organization (ISO) specifies performance and alarm categories and sound specifications. All manufacturers design and build to the standard for their individual devices. The standard was created to help make the alarms discernible from other sounds in the hospital, but the device manufacturer will not know which alarm is most important, so a healthcare professional needs to be able to hear all of the alarms.

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In the health IT development hype cycle, a number of novel technologies have been announced and marketed. One example is the Qualcomm Tricorder Xprize, which is a competition designed to encourage developers to build a device that will diagnosis and self-treat a number of chronic conditions without the need for a physician. This prize is from the same organization (Xprise) that tried to encourage suborbital flight from commercial spacecraft companies.

Technology is so pervasive in healthcare that books have been written about “The Internet of Health Things” (Kvedar J.C., The Internet of Healthy Things) that describe the wonderful new sensors patients can wear and measure their health every day. Even within older data collection paradigms, the healthcare area is talking about patient-reported outcomes and how we need to incorporate this data with the electronic health record to help improve patient care.

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For every patient who is hospitalized, a team of clinicians seeks to improve his health in order to help discharge him or to transfer him to another facility. During a hospital stay, physicians and nurses are the two main providers who interact with each patient. Depending on the illness, pharmacists, occupational and physical therapists, social workers and a number of additional healthcare providers can be involved with the care of a patient. Healthcare has become a team endeavor, placing a high priority on proper and effective communication among those providers.

The transformation from individual to team-based collaborative practice has taken on such a significant role that in 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) proposed a framework for how interprofessional education should move forward. The year before, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM), American Association of College of Pharmacy (AACP), American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC), American Dental Education Association (ADEA) and Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) came together to create the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) with a goal to improve communication for care. So what are some of the barriers to effective communication across these teams, and how can advances in technology make a difference?

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