Today’s hospital nurses receive too many alarms, from too many devices, with too little actionable information to respond efficiently to their patients. The consequences are serious: Nurses become overwhelmed, patient care suffers and healthcare organizations don’t operate as efficiently as they should.
One way to alleviate the problem is to provide relevant patient information in every notification so nurses can differentiate between alarms that require immediate attention and those that are less critical. We’ve heard from many of our customers that their caregivers receive hundreds of nurse calls and physiological monitor alarms on every shift, with no accompanying information to put those notifications in context – creating a definite danger of “alarm fatigue.” It just so happens that many of our customers also use Connexall® middleware for alarm management, so we’ve teamed with our partner Connexall to create solutions that take advantage of the market’s most powerful middleware and communication platforms.
Just as KLAS recently named Voalte Category Leader in the 2017 Best in KLAS: Software and Services report for Secure Communications Platform, KLAS also named Connexall number-one for Alarm Management. Connexall gives hospitals an alarm management and event notification platform that integrates with multiple systems and routes alarms to the appropriate person at the appropriate time. Voalte Platform offers hospitals a complete communication platform that enables care coordination via voice calls, text messaging, and alarm and alert management. Together, Voalte and Connexall provide a collaborative solution that:
- Reduces the number of alarms and alerts clinicians receive.
- Includes actionable patient information in every notification.
- Streamlines communication across the care continuum.
One way we provide context for alarms and alerts is with a secure embedded web viewer. While smartphones support launching the Safari or Android browser to view a web page, the browser history left behind can provide unintended access to protected health information (PHI). Now, with our secure embedded web viewer, caregivers can receive any web page along with an alarm or alert without a security risk. For example, if a staff member receives an alarm from a pump that the battery needs to be changed, we can send a document with instructions on how to change the battery along with the alarm.
The embedded web viewer also gives caregivers instant access to real-time patient information in conjunction with alarms sent through Connexall to the Voalte smartphone, supporting better patient assessment and clinical decision-making. Today we announced a new integration of Connexall middleware and Voalte Platform with Bernoulli One™ to deliver alerts with waveforms and other real-time patient information directly to the appropriate caregiver’s smartphone. Bernoulli One gives caregivers “at-the-moment” insights into a patient’s condition, rather than a static picture from the time of an alert. (See today’s announcement, and schedule a demo to see this new integration at HIMSS17.)
We’re sure that healthcare organizations will create other advanced clinical workflows with the embedded web viewer, which could include video feeds, security monitoring of infants, remote sitting and so on. Combining the power of Voalte Platform with our strategic partnerships promotes the interoperability that will ensure your systems extend well into the future.
Alex Brown is Director of Strategy at Voalte.
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