Two hospitals are leveraging a new interface to orchestrate message notifications sent to clinicians’ iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
The new interface, recently released by Philips Emergin, has been implemented at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, FL and Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, CA.
Voalté One is a system designed to enable phone calls across the hospital VoIP system, text messaging via the user directory and user-friendly alert management through Emergin’s interface adapter. Through this interface, Voalte officials said caregivers can receive and respond to alert messages dispatched by Emergin from an increasing array of input data systems and devices within the hospital.
“Traditional communication methods, such as pagers, were not working for the hospital’s caregivers,” said Ron Rutherford, RN, director of informatics at Huntington Hospital. “We were in need of greater flexibility for accessing important information.”
“We were using antiquated pagers to receive alerts from our Philips patient monitors,” said Eunie Lee, RN at Huntington Hospital. “The pagers were slow and information was difficult to understand. Now we have clear, up-to-date notifications right at our fingertips.”
The first phase of the deployment focused on replacing pagers with the iPod Touch which was then integrated to Philips monitoring through an Emergin Patient Monitoring Gateway. Voalté officials said low and high priority ringtones were assigned to yellow and red alerts to automatically notify caregivers to the level of importance for the message.
“The text messaging feature enables me to better prioritize my tasks and communicate more efficiently with my coworkers,” added Lee.
Officials said the results from implementation of the Emergin/Voalté solution at Huntington Hospital showed a reduction in the number of phone calls made per shift and improved Press Ganey scores for the unit in the two categories, “noise in and around the room” and “response time to call bell.”
Sarasota Memorial Hospital officials said the hospital rooms and halls seemed to be quieter as a result of the Emergin/Voalté integration with iPhones, which has significantly roverhead paging.
Huntington Hospital has initiated a project to replace legacy phones with iPhones and extend the Emergin/Voalté solution to the hospital’s in-house phone system. Huntington clinical staff are expected to have voice, alert and text communications on one device. Hospital officials said phone numbers will automatically link to user names and each user will retain the same extension, regardless of device, further optimizing communications.
