Your crucial role in patient care starts with Communication
When a code blue occurs, hospital teams expect the right people to be
notified immediately and to respond to the emergency. If a patient needs
immediate medical attention, he or she expects the caregiver to respond quickly.
When a patient’s family member contacts your hospital call center, the caller
expects to be transferred to the correct room in a matter of seconds. When
physicians are waiting on crucial patient results from pathology, they expect to
be contacted on their preferred device accurately and efficiently. And when an
operator needs to reach a staff member at home, he or she expects the
on-call scheduling information to be accurate.
These basic expectations underscore how excellent communications within your
hospital contact center and beyond are at the core of every good, responsible
organization. Successful hospitals must respond to patients, physicians, nurses,
and other staff members quickly and accurately. Think about the role of
technology in this environment. A communication system that gets the right
information to the right person at the right time can lead to improved patient
safety, increased satisfaction, better efficiencies, or even mean the difference
between life and death.
Amcom represents the communication backbone in the hospital—the central
foundation that all applications and resources access for reliable, consistent
communication information. To be the main system of truth, Amcom connects with
PBXs, nurse call systems, patient monitoring, clinical systems, and human
resource systems and delivers the information to the right people on their
device of choice. This even includes smartphones alongside pagers, wi-fi phones
and other common devices. Learn more about smartphone
pager replacement.
Category One – Organization Information
1. Type of healthcare organization:
Hospital (general medical, surgical, psychiatric, substance abuse, specialty)
Nursing
and residential care (nursing care, mental care, elderly care)
Ambulatory services (physician office, dentist, outpatient, laboratory, home
health)
2. Location:
3. Approximate size of your healthcare facility:
Fewer than 100 beds
100-300
beds
301-500
beds
More than 500 beds
Category Two – Wireless Connectivity
4. Which types of wireless communication devices do
you support? Check all that apply.
Long range pagers
On-site pagers
Wireless
in-house phones (examples include Vocera, SpectraLink, Cisco, Polycom, Alcatel,
Avaya, NEC, Nortel)
Smartphones (examples include iPhone,
BlackBerry)
Land-to-mobile
radios
Not sure/None
5. What percentage of clinical staff uses wireless communication devices
(not including pagers)?
Less
than 30%
30%-50%
More
than 50%
Not
sure/None
6. Which of the following staff in your hospital carry wireless devices?
Check all that apply
Physicians
Nurses
Biomed personnel
Housekeeping
Maintenance
Security
IT
Not sure/None
7. Which of the following systems in your hospital send notifications or
alerts directly to your clinical staff’s wireless communication devices? Check
all that apply.
Nurse call
Patient
monitoring
Pulse oximeters
Fire alarm
Building alarms
Bed management
Infant
protection
Critical
lab results
Ventilators
Infusion pumps
Other
None
Not sure
8. If you checked any of the systems in the previous question, which
communication devices are receiving these text-based notifications or alerts?
Long
range pagers
On-site pagers
Wireless
in-house phones (examples include Vocera, SpectraLink, Cisco, Polycom, Alcatel,
Avaya, NEC, Nortel)
Smartphones (examples include iPhone,
BlackBerry)
Land-to-mobile
radios
No systems are receiving notifications or alerts
Not sure
Category Three – Communication Efficiency
9. How much time could be saved each day by nurses if
they had wireless devices that received notifications from clinical systems like
nurse call and patient monitoring?
15
minutes
30
minutes
1 hour
More than 1 hour
Not
sure
10. At your organization, how often would you say nurses are able to
communicate immediately with other caregivers and decision makers, whether
face-to-face or via mobile communications methods?
Always
Most of the time
Sometimes
Not
often
Never
Not
sure
11. At your organization, how often do you feel inefficient
communications have a direct effect on patient care?
Very
often
Sometimes
Not
often
Never
Not
sure
12. Which of the following best describes your situation?
Considering implementing a new type of
wireless devices
Have wireless devices, but not
receiving notifications from clinical systems
Have wireless devices and are
receiving notifications from clinical systems, but messages are not prioritized
before being sent to staff
Have wireless devices and are
receiving notifications from clinical systems and all messages are prioritized
None of the above
Category Four – Communication Systems
13. At your organization, do personnel use speech
recognition systems to automatically connect to others? These systems are part
of the phone system and prompt users to say a name or department and then
connect them without human intervention.
Yes
No
Not
sure
14. At your organization, can you page/message by role? In other words,
can you simply page the on-call cardiologist and rely on a system to contact the
right person automatically?
Yes
No
Not
sure
15. Is a Web-based directory available throughout your organization
whereby staff can gain updated contact information for the right people?
Yes
No
Not
sure
16. Is a Web-based directory available throughout your organization
whereby authorized staff can update and look up on-call schedules?
Yes
No
Not
sure
17. Can you send a page to a person and have it appear on his/her
smartphone (iPhone, BlackBerry)?
Yes
No
Not
sure
18. When you send pages/messages, are you able to provide a complete
audit trail indicating when the message was sent, received, and read?
Yes
No
Not
sure
19. Do staff members have a means to learn the best contact method for a
given individual? In other words, are you able to look up how/and on which
device Dr. Jones wants to be called during the day as well as during the
evening?
Yes
No
Not
sure
20. Do you provide presence/whereabouts information in a system about
staff – knowing whether they are in or out of the hospital?
Yes
No
Not
sure
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