How important is response confirmation in critical alert messaging?
When it comes to clinical alarms from patient care devices (PCDs), patient safety depends on notifying the correct personnel quickly and reliably. Additionally, life-threatening patient alarms must be quickly and correctly directed to the individuals most able to immediately successfully intervene at the time of the alert. An important part of the clinical alerting process involves confirmation – determining whether the correct personnel received the message, whether they are in a position to respond, and whether the alarm needs to be escalated.
In today’s hospital environment, PCDs continually detect life-threatening medical conditions and issue alarms that must be acted on by busy staff who may be already engaged in other critical interventions. Confirmation is essential, and the very best solution for providing this confirmation is a response paging system. They are easy to use, extremely reliable, and provide a high-performance method to notify personnel of PCD alarms.
A response paging system transmits a PCD alarm as a single, high-power digital broadcast to one or more small pager-like devices. These pagers then confirm receipt of the message, confirm that the user has read the messages, and then allow the user to optionally indicate their intent and ability to respond with just two to three additional button presses. This system does not rely on Wi-Fi, cell phone, or downloadable applications, and it does not suffer from dead spots or unexpected interference. It also does not burden clinical personnel with extra work related to carrying, configuring, and using these devices. NO other critical alerting system approaches the speed, assurance, and reliability, or efficiency of a response paging system.
A response paging system can also provide a low-cost and reliable nurse call functionality, because it uses independent, custom wireless communications technology, so nurse call services are not affected by local LAN or commercial wireless outages. Utilizing a small handheld fob, that looks and works much like an electronic car door opener, a patient simply pushes a button and the nurse’s pager receives the message. The system can also be programmed to communicate with larger alarm management systems for relaying messages to nurses’ pagers.
This add-on feature can provide smaller hospitals with a low-cost nurse call alternative to the very costly systems on the market today. Larger hospitals can use the system as a back-up to their facilities’ presently installed nurse call systems. A response paging system can even be used for routine administrative operational messaging where and when it’s needed within the hospital. All-in-all, a response paging system is a multi-dimensional tool that can provide reliable messaging for multiple healthcare functions.