Case studies

Greenslopes Private Hospital

Overview

Founded in 1942, Greenslopes Private Hospital is a tertiary medical facility dedicated to providing Brisbane, Australia and surrounding communities with the best possible care and services. Greenslopes is the leading private teaching hospital in Australia and is owned and operated by Ramsay Health Care. Ramsay Health Care is Australia’s largest operator of private hospitals with Greenslopes Private Hospital being their flagship facility.

Industry

  • Healthcare

Business drivers

  • Simplify caregiver notifications and improve efficiency
  • Provide high levels of patient care by improving caregiver response times
  • Link various alert/alarm systems to mobile staff on a variety of devices

Solution

  • Spok® Messenger Clinical Alerting

Results

  • Seamless integration with nurse call, duress and patient monitoring/ telemetry systems
  • Notifications can be sent via numerous methods to a myriad of devices
  • Improved caregiver efficiency

The challenge

As Australia’s largest private teaching hospital, Greenslopes Private Hospital offers both inpatient and day services throughout its 575-bed facility. A facility of this size uses numerous clinical alert and alarm systems, and a wide variety of staff communication devices – the scope of which can be dizzying and make communications among the extensive team of caregivers a serious challenge.

Hundreds of critical messages are sent every day to the Greenslopes staff on their mobile devices. Messages include notifications about medical emergencies (code pages), staff communications, security or duress issues, and mechanical problems in the hospital.

With so many systems in place, ensuring caregivers responsible for monitoring the different systems received timely and accurate messages was critical. With a mobile staff, Greenslopes Private Hospital needed highly reliable communications and monitoring of system integrity to ensure every message could get through.

With a nurse call system, a Rauland® duress system, and a Philips® telemetry patient monitoring system in place, Greenslopes needed a solution that would integrate with these three key systems and other communication applications. The goal was to automatically detect messages from the systems, filter them appropriately, and send the right alert to the right caregiver on the right device at the right time.

The solution

Management at Greenslopes Private Hospital strongly supported finding a solution to streamline notifications and communications. After evaluating different systems, Greenslopes selected Spok® Messenger. Spok Messenger is middleware that integrates with a variety of alert and alarm systems to send notifications to staff members’ mobile devices.

“Greenslopes strives for superior patient care and excellence while focusing on quality systems, and [Spok] Messenger fits in very nicely,” said Steve Morland, Biomedical Technical Officer at Greenslopes Private Hospital. “[Spok] Messenger not only allows us to send notifications to our pagers, but we are able to send messages to staff via email and mobile phones as well.”

Greenslopes strives for superior patient care and excellence while focusing on quality systems, and [Spok] Messenger fits in very nicely.

– Steve Morland, Biomedical Technical Officer

The result

If a staff member pushes the emergency button in a patient’s room, the Sedco nurse call system generates a Code Blue signal. This is sent to the Spok Messenger system for transmission to the Code Blue team’s pagers. The hospital also has an alternate notification system, called Medical Alert Team (MET) alerts, that uses the system as the primary contact method. “The hospital staff have to trust the paging system to be reliable 24/7,” said Morland. “It is important that the right people get the right messages every time. The [Spok] Messenger system also allows alert messages to be copied to specific email addresses for recording and quality assurance purposes.”

Alerts from the Rauland duress system have also benefited staff considerably. When staff members feel they are in danger, they can discretely push a duress button, which sends an immediate notification to the appropriate personnel’s pagers, indicating the location. This allows staff/security to race to the scene immediately and provide assistance.

Through implementing Spok Messenger, Greenslopes staff members are no longer required to constantly keep an eye on monitoring stations. For example, in the cardiac ward nurses can monitor patients on screens at a monitoring station or can be mobile, receiving alerts regarding their patients’ conditions on their pagers. When a patient’s preset thresholds are reached, the Philips monitoring system sends the patient’s name and information regarding their condition to the Spok Messenger system for transmission to the nurse’s pager.

“In addition to the pages that are automatically sent from alert and alarm systems, personnel are able to manually send pages through [Spok] Messenger,” said Morland. This can be done through a variety of methods. These include personnel using a phone to dial into the paging system and send a numeric message to a specific pager, a page to a specific number, calling the switchboard operators to send out individual or group pages, and using a computer to log into a web interface to send either alphanumeric or numeric messages.

The future

In addition to streamlining paging communications, Greenslopes Private Hospital is currently evaluating Spok’s operator console for the hospital’s switchboard. This would provide operators with greater features and functionality while working seamlessly with the existing Spok Messenger solution.