GE Healthcare and Dübendorf, Switzerland-based Ascom Wireless Solutions have announced plans to launch a wireless hospital-wide messaging system, designed to improve workflow and communication for healthcare providers.
The system, which aligns the GE Healthcare patient monitoring platform with Ascom's wireless communication products, will enable physicians and nurses to receive clinical text messages and pager alerts throughout the hospitals – which can customize, filter and send secondary alarms to clinicians' Ascom Voice over IP (VoIP) phones, pagers and Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) handsets.
The partnership comes on the heels of a recent study, "Point of Care Communications for Nursing," which was conducted by Spyglass Consulting Group. It found that incompatible hospital communications systems make it difficult for nurses to communicate effectively with patients and to wirelessly collaborate with care team members.
“Hospitals are purchasing communications solutions from different vendors requiring different mobile handsets that operate over different wireless frequencies,” said Gregg Malkary, managing director of Spyglass Consulting Group. "Nurses are forced to carry multiple communications devices to address specific job functions and responsibilities. Critical messages, non-critical messages and spam are frequently interspersed on the same or different devices making it difficult to filter, manage and prioritize communications from team members."
Caregivers are highly mobile, yet require access to patient data to support critical-care decisions in near real-time. According to that Spyglass report, 66 percent of hospital-based nurses said their organizations had deployed VoIP-based communications to enable greater mobility, so they can perform their jobs more efficiently at the point of care. Yet cost considerations have focused deployments on specific hospital departments and limited distribution of VoIP handsets to key nursing personnel.
GE Healthcare and Ascom seek to turn streams of disparate patient monitoring information into an improved clinical workflow for mobile caregivers. By interfacing wireless hardware and middleware with patient monitoring devices, the two companies will offer hospitals a "one-stop" solution for wireless secondary alarm management. Mobile hospital-wide secondary alarm notifications, via automated text messaging or paging, offer enhancements to workflow by providing clinicians with clinical information anywhere throughout the hospital.
"Increasingly, hospitals are leveraging wireless technologies to deliver clinical data directly to mobile devices, leading to valuable productivity gains," said David Ataide, vice president and general manager of monitoring solutions and diagnostic cardiology at GE Healthcare. "By collaborating with Ascom, a global leader in on-site wireless communication systems, GE Healthcare is working to advance hospital alarm management and build on our vision to provide excellent access to quality patient information from most communication devices."
"Ascom sees GE Healthcare as an important clinical partner where we add mobility to the medical information," added Fritz Mumenthaler, general manager of the Wireless Solution Division and member of the Ascom Group Executive Board. "The cooperation between GE Healthcare and Ascom will allow hospital staff to better manage their time to increase patient satisfaction."
