Latent and inconsistent alarm notifications are not an option

Patrick Hourtoulle

February 04, 2021

Improve care team responsiveness and reduce alarm fatigue with an efficient notification service

According to a U.S. hospital study, approximately $12 billion is wasted annually due to poor communication among care providers. Of that money, 40 percent, or about 5 billion dollars, is due to latency in nurse communications. Another study in 2015 called “A call to action: Overcoming Communication Challenges in Hospitals,” from Accenture, reveals a typical 500-bed acute-care hospital can experience an annual economic burden of about $4 million due to time wasted in physician and nurse communications and a potential increase in length of patient stays.

同样的逻辑也适用于警报延迟, in extreme cases, 更严重地影响病人的健康.

Thus, the second major hospital challenge on health and safety hazard is the alarm fatigue, 使护理人员经常受到警报的影响, 让他们感到不知所措或心烦意乱, 而且可能对警报不敏感. All those consequences can lead to longer response times or to missing important alarms. Tens of thousands of alerts may signal throughout a hospital each day, 根据联合委员会, 美国医院认证组织. Some 85%–90% of these alerts are false or nuisance alarms, indicating conditions that don’t require clinical intervention.

我们如何帮助医院解决这些挑战?

阿尔卡特朗讯企业, 作为沟通的推动者, 提供编排平台, which centralizes alarm monitoring by sending the right notification message at the right place thanks to a smart routing mechanism. Hence, we help connect people, objects, services, and streamline hospital workflows.

该平台结合了:

•各种各样的报警和监控系统 
• Many standards commonly used by medical equipment and nurse call, fire alarm, 楼宇管理系统  
•沟通系统和协作工具

Thus, 这个平台将他们团结在一起, 所以他们确实优化了员工的时间, 病人护理和安全.

How can an efficient notification server optimize alarm workflows?

First, the notification platform collects and aggregates alarm triggered from various systems and connected equipment. Among these various external systems are industry specific alarm systems, pagers, nurse calls, fire alerts, wander prevention, 工业报警和楼宇管理系统. 所连接的设备可以是存在感传感器, camera, smart-bed, floor sensor or even medical devices such as patient monitoring or infusion pumps from different brands (Dräger, Mindray, Philipps, General Electric, etc.)

Second, the notification platform enables a specific workflow depending on the situation - such as trigger location, calendar or availability to notify one person or a group of people in many ways, 比如ALE手机上的电话或短信, emails, SMS, social media, and more. 通知也可以在移动中进行, 在医院里还是在外面, 通过一个名为SmartApp的客户端软件, 在智能手机上运行并发出警报.

Let’s illustrate those principles with two practical use cases based on a nurse call scenario:

A patient requires medical assistance, so he presses the nurse call button. As soon as the notification platform receives the alarm, it checks the nurses calendar to identify several nurses on duty. Calls are established towards the different kinds of phones of the available nurses. When a nurse acknowledges the call to accept the mission, notification on the other nurse’s phone is stopped. 如果没有护士回答, the notification platform can escalate and notify a chief nurse.

The nurse call system is generally used for medical inquiries; however, it is often misused for other service requests from the patient, 比如电视接入问题. The solution may offer the patient a self-service application to access the right person to resolve the issue without disturbing caregivers inappropriately. 万一遥控器出现故障, the application sends a request to the appropriate technical service via chat, SMS, etc.

This kind of connectivity is possible through our orchestration platform, collaboration tool and APIs integrating into the patient self-service application.

This highly efficient orchestration platform is comprised of Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX® Enterprise, IQ Messenger and Rainbow™ solutions. 通过优化报警工作流程, this platform makes clinical staffs’ lives easier with less alarm fatigue, which contributes to enhancing care delivery quality as well as hospital efficiency and safety.

了解更多关于ALE的信息 healthcare solutions 能帮助你提供最佳护理吗.