Capital Health’s Specialized Rehabilitation Hospital in the United Arab Emirates provides acute and long-term rehabilitation care, along with inpatient, outpatient, and Home Health Rehabilitation.
The Challenge:
Capital Health’s Specialized Rehabilitation Hospital needed a more efficient way to communicate and respond to Code Blue alerts. Outdated notification methods had the potential to lead to delayed response times, putting patient health at risk.
The Solution:
Under the direction of Dr. Mishal Al Kasimi, CEO of Capital Health, the hospital implemented InformaCast Fusion mass notification software to streamline its Code Blue alerting procedure. Hospital staff can now swiftly initiate alerts from Cisco phones and nurse stations, as well as push the notification to a wide range of devices for improved response times.
Identifying Inefficiencies
Capital Health’s Specialized Rehabilitation Hospital in the United Arab Emirates provides acute and long-term rehabilitation care, along with inpatient, outpatient, and Home Health Rehabilitation. While the new facility was still under construction, Harun Jaradat, the Director of IT for Capital Health, identified key requirements to improve the efficiency of the organization’s Code alerting, especially in regard to cardiac arrest emergencies.
At the time, hospital workers initiated Code alerts from a wall-hung nurse call phone. The nurse would need to input an access code to identify themselves and then press the Code Blue alert button. Once the alert was initiated, it would trigger a sound throughout the floor and alert the nurse call station. The call station would receive the patient’s room number linked to the alert, and the nurse would then call the switchboard operator on the ground floor. The switchboard operator was then trained to send out a live audio paging alert over the PA system on all floors. Finally, the corresponding nurse needed to call the switchboard operator to confirm the nurse on shift had received the message and would attend to the issue.
This multi-step process was inefficient and disrupted patients and visitors who were not implicated in the alert. This resulted in slow reaction time, an inability to target the right nurses on shift, and delayed response times which could have critical implications for patients.
“Every minute lost in attending a cardiac arrest situation means 20 percent less survivability,” said Jaradat.
Turning to Mass Notification in Healthcare
Tasked by Dr. Mishal Al Kasimi, CEO of Capital Health, to have a state-of-the-art hospital that utilized the latest technologies to achieve utmost operations efficiency, Jaradat selected InformaCast Fusion to integrate with the hospital’s 500 Cisco IP phones and nurse calling system. Implementing the mass notification software into the organization would improve processes that result in better response times and overall patient care. To help speed up the initiation of a Code alert, messages can now be triggered using any Cisco IP phone in the building. Once triggered, messages are broadcast to Cisco wireless phones, mobile phones, and the hospital’s public address system. This helps ensure the right people receive the right message at the right time, meaning they can respond more quickly to emergency medical events.
“The building is fully covered,” said Jaradat. “We can now reach all of our people whether they are in their offices, in the corridors, or somewhere else in the building.”
For any hospital, providing excellent patient care is a top priority. That relies on strong communication to address patient needs. InformaCast Fusion offers healthcare organizations the ability to connect on-premises and mobile devices to a single system for notifications that impact patient care. This helps reduce the time it takes to trigger a message, getting information into the hands of people who can help faster. The faster people can respond to patient needs, the better the outcome.
“InformaCast provided the flexibility and reliability we needed,” said Jaradat.
That flexibility extends to non-emergency use cases as well. During the official Eid holidays celebrating the end of Ramadan, Dr. Al Kasimi was able to record a message from his IP phone as ad hoc audio and send it out to all staff. The message thanked them for their hard work and wished them the best for the holidays.
Expanding for the Future
The solution currently deployed uses DialCast, ad hoc audio recording, IP phone audio and mobile phones with the InformaCast app, and Cisco WiFi phones. The hospital has set up three Code scenarios using InformaCast to easily provide detailed information about life-threatening events. In the future, the hospital will expand Code initiation to its nurse call system and will add desktop computers as endpoints to receive mass notifications. The goal is to have a robust ecosystem of devices that can be used to initiate and deliver messages quickly to the people who can assist patients and help save lives.
“There is always a need for an instant communication tool,” said Jaradat. “Everyone needs to be able to receive it, and it should include clear actions people should take.”
Visit our Healthcare page for more information about how healthcare organizations can implement InformaCast to help enhance safety, communication, and patient care.