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Healthcare Isn’t Like Other Industries When It Comes to Communications April 28, 2010 Topic: Benefits & Outcomes Given the serious nature of their role, hospitals need to approach communications differently from other industries. Because of this, a different type of communications infrastructure is required. Why is this? Consider the following: Communications can mean life and death: First and foremost, communications are mission-critical in a hospital. We are not talking about a message going to voicemail or someone missing a meeting. Lives are on the line.
The Six Ways Leading Hospitals Use Unified Communications to Improve Patient Care, Safety, and Satisfaction Given the clear need for accurate, streamlined communications, below are the ways your hospital can leverage today’s unified communications capabilities to improve your patient care, safety, and satisfaction.
Enabling Care, Safety, and Efficiency Through Unified Communications April 19, 2010 Topic: Benefits & Outcomes Mary, a patient at your hospital, wears a heart monitor. Her physician sets up a communications alert to ensure he is notified if it goes off. At 10 p.m. it does. The nurse on duty is notified immediately on an in-house wireless telephone and quickly assists Mary. But the doctor needs to be alerted, too. The technology behind the scenes instantly checks the communication rules regarding whom to contact, where, and on what device. The system indicates that Mary’s doctor left the hospital at 9 p.m., so an urgent message goes to his smartphone instead of his onsite pager. If it’s not read quickly, a text-to-speech message is sent to his home phone. If unanswered, the contact center agent is notified and the message is escalated to another on-call physician. Sound futuristic? It isn’t. Because everyone is mobile and everyone has at least one communications device, reaching the right person in a time of critical need can be a complex process. Technology with intelligence is key to patient care, safety, and satisfaction—as well as optimized workflow and staff efficiency. Unified Communications: It’s All About Managing the Details The potential of communications has expanded beyond the realm of simply making a connection between two people in static locations. In healthcare, a myriad of clinical, safety, and other communication systems constantly generates updates, alerts, and key pieces of information. This is in addition to your staff’s ongoing need to connect directly with one another to collaborate on patient care. But unless the right data is gathered and delivered to the right person, at the right time, on the right communications device, it’s useless. People and technology now need to communicate flawlessly to speed response times and keep safety and satisfaction in the forefront. Given this vast amount of information, the way your organization communicates needs to change every minute—but seamlessly and behind the scenes—in order to rally the right caregivers to help patients. Doctors go in and out of surgery and staffing assignments change around the clock. So when a patient comes to the emergency department with heart attack symptoms in the middle of the night, are you quickly gathering all the right people when the code STEMI is called? Patients’ lives depend on the coordination and management of details like this. Sonitor ultrasound system saves Saint Michael’s time and money April 12, 2010 Topic: Outcomes in the News
The new systems helps St. Michael’s find equipment that needs maintenance. In the past, nurses have had to spend time away from patients searching for lost equipment, hospital executives said. The hospital’s biomedical engineering team, who are charged with servicing and maintaining the equipment, are also challenged when they can’t find the equipment they’re assigned to manage and maintain. “We do have a lot of equipment that disappears such as wheel chairs, IV pumps and heart monitors, and nurses spend a lot of time looking for equipment,” said Angelo Schittone, VP and CIO at Saint Michael’s. The tracking technology will provide cost savings in other ways. The cost benefit is twofold, Schittone said: “One is we’re able to track equipment so that our technicians can service them more efficiently, which saves in a technician’s time. The other benefit is the equipment is actually maintained on a regular basis so that the equipment should last longer because it’s maintained better,” he said. The tracking system can help nurses schedule patient care with greater efficiency as they move among departments for testing, Schittone said. Real-time location tags on patients let nurses know, for example, if a patient is out of his or her room taking a radiology exam when a tray of food has to be delivered, Schittone said, so they take the food up when the patient returns. [Hospital Tracks Equipment With Real-Time Ultrasound System] InformationWeek |
As part of an effort to increase efficiency and save money, Saint Michael’s Medical Center will install IBM’s Real-Time Location Services software and Sonitor Technologies’ ultrasound infrastructure to track equipment, alert staff when inventories are low and ensure compliance with patient safety regulations.| 1750 Enterprise Way | Suite 107 Marietta, Georgia 30067 Tel 770-988-8744 | Fax 770-988-9612 Toll Free: 800-882-4396 |
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