Take Fast Action to Address Time-Critical Alarms

Many hospitals today face the same challenge. Everyone agrees that quality and speed of patient care are essential. Yet, the highly mobile staff at most healthcare facilities often cannot provide the best care possible due to poor communication procedures. Staff members have become frustrated at the inefficiency that results with undirected updates and alerts being sent to clinicians and other staff members. One patient’s lab results have come in. Another is reporting pain through the nurse call system. A third’s heart monitor is beeping. Someone wants to speak with a doctor. The security system is acting up. The list goes on.

How has this happened? It’s simple. Today’s technology – point-of-care, safety, nurse call, and other systems – generates a lot of valuable information that needs to be shared. The trouble is that it’s not being shared in meaningful ways with the right people. The result is slower response to critical events, and patient care, safety, and satisfaction can suffer. A unified, hospital enterprise notification system is needed.

Deliver Clinical Alerts To The Right Staff Members

Clinical alerting systems for hospitals are designed to reduce the constant buzzing and beeping of systems that alert caregivers to patient requests, changes in vitals, overhead pages, and open doors. Alerting software also helps ensure the right staff members receive these notifications on their mobile devices. Patient monitoring alerts, test results, and other important updates are delivered through a secure, reliable hospital communication system that allows nurses and physicians to improve patient care.

Minimize Noise To Improve Patient And Staff Environment

Still, the constant noise on patient floors today has become concerning for many. Although the buzzes and beeps are designed to alert caregivers of patient status and needs, too often they negatively impact patients’ ability to rest and heal. In addition, staff can experience alarm fatigue due to too many sounds competing for their attention.

Hospitals are moving toward more subtle communications among nurses, doctors, and clinical monitoring systems to help in their quiet hospital initiatives or “Shhh campaigns.” Now nurse call alerts, patient monitoring alerts, and other important notifications can reach the right person on his or her mobile device. Alert notification software can even allow care teams to use mobile devices to access and review real-time patient data, including live streaming waveforms. And patient electronic health records can often be updated at the same time.

Learn How To Improve Clinical Alerting In These Critical Areas:

Clinical alerting is a critical part of the Spok Care Connect^® communication platform, a suite of secure, responsive solutions that integrates into your hospital’s existing clinical workflows. See how it all works together >

Convert Beeps And Buzzes To Mobile Device Alerts

Spok clinical alerting sends critical information and updates from your alert systems, such as nurse call, patient monitoring, and many others to mobile staff on their communication devices. At a high level, it creates an enterprise-wide approach to the management, prioritization, and response to key events. This includes the ability to send messages to the right people based on rules set up in your hospital, including escalated communications whenever necessary. It also means you can manage devices easily and allocate staff appropriately.

Ultimately, being able to reach mobile team members within seconds of a critical alert improves overall workflow, staff productivity, and the comfort and safety of everyone in your facility.

Spok clinical alerting software works with virtually all end-user communication devices on the market, including smartphones, tablets, pagers, and Wi-Fi phones. This capability enables a streamlined workflow where critical information flows securely from clinical machines to mobile caregivers (and to additional caregivers if needed), all in the interest of top-notch patient care.

Managing Today’s Sources of Information

Healthcare organizations need effective ways of centralizing all of the information generated by clinical and security systems and distributing it to the right person. They also need technology with demonstrable ROI.

Spok enables health systems to expand the possibilities of their existing communication infrastructure with a critical layer of connectivity and meaningful information sharing. As the leader in this space, Spok lets you create powerful linkages among your systems, technology, and staff. Erasing system boundaries is essential to your ability to achieve ROI, improve efficiency for staff, and enhance patient care, safety, and satisfaction.

Explore the many inputs and outputs that Spok can connect to as you advance interoperability at your organization:

Spok Interoperability

Providing the functionality that enables quick response

Integration to your communication devices

Whether your organization uses in-building wireless phones, LED signs, voice communication badges, pagers, smartphones, tablets or even all of them in the same facility, send staff the right alarms and updates on the appropriate devices at all times.

Mobile web messaging

Leverage support for mobile, web-based messaging with any Spok clinical alerting user or station from the mobile app.

Alarm filtering

Establish rules that direct the right alarms to the right staff members to eliminate unnecessary alerts. Filtering also means off-duty staff aren’t bothered by updates that don’t occur during their shift. Using live streaming patient data from various patient care devices, unique smart alarms can also be created to filter out alarms that aren’t clinically actionable.

Assignment client

Enhance workflows and increase efficiency with assignment and scheduling tools. This means that updates are sent to the right person based on his or her role and device preferences.

Messages originating from patient care systems already in place

Systems such as lab results, radiology results, and patient vitals can be directly linked to your staff’s devices for fast updates. Doctors and nurses no longer need to call down to the lab requesting results, lab techs no longer need to play phone tag trying to find the responsible caregiver to receive critical results, and overall patient care is improved by speeding up these communications. Spok is an active participant in the efforts of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) to standardize these systems for ease of implementation. Spok views this organization as the future of hospital system integration and even holds a seat on the IHE standards board.

Enabling Security And Ease of Administration

User-configured access and filtering by department

Let users see only what they need to based on their role/department. Advanced filtering means fewer broad-based alerts to go to people who don’t need to receive them.

Extensible messaging support

Plan for the future with an extensible system that can grow with your organization as new devices and systems are required. You won’t have to forklift your entire messaging strategy every time something changes.

Web-based administration

Many functions within Spok clinical alerting can be accomplished securely online. This centralized, thin-client approach makes the solution easier to deploy and maintain.

Integration with Spok Care Connect^®

As the global leader in healthcare communications, Spok offers health systems a broad suite of integrated solutions. In addition to Spok clinical alerting, these spans communication tools for contact center management, web-based employee directories, on-call scheduling, speech recognition, emergency and incident management, secure texting, and paging.

Clinical context

Spok clinical alerting allows for additional patient information from the EHR to be delivered along with the message from third-party systems such as nurse call. The alert notification software helps the clinician by giving additional clinical context for these messages, such as patient name, diagnosis detail, and physician observations. Using alarm surveillance technology, care teams can also use smartphones to remotely view real-time patient data (including waveforms) from the various patient care devices.