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Medical City Deploys New Clinical Safety System That Puts Patient Safety First

Posted on: Wednesday, 19 April 2006, 09:00 CDT

Medical City Dallas Hospital is the first hospital anywhere to employ a new technology that streamlines staff communications and give clinicians better, faster access to critical patient information. The Clinical Safety System, developed by Emergin, Inc., is a turnkey technology platform that helps enterprise organizations create zero-defect communications.

Emergin fully integrated its Clinical Safety System with Medical City's existing Executone(R) nurse call system and its GE(R) patient monitoring technology. The system receives patient alarms, and other event notifications, generated by the patient monitoring technology and dispatches them directly to the appropriate nurse's SpectraLink wireless phone using pre-defined priority and personnel rules.

Now, when a patient alarm goes off (such as from a heart or blood pressure monitor), a message is immediately sent to the appropriate nurse's mobile phone, often accompanied by a screen capture from the monitoring device. If the primary nurse does not respond within three rings, that message will roll to the secondary nurse or to whomever the staff managers designate.

With Emergin's Clinical Safety System in place, limited nursing resources are optimized. The Clinical Safety System determines the right nurse to notify and provides that nurse with the right information at the right time - regardless of where the nurse may be physically located in the healthcare facility. In addition to providing nurses with more flexibility and mobility throughout the hospital, the Clinical Safety System also collects and records all communications and creates a comprehensive audit trail of information, each of which improves patient safety, the efficient use of nurse resources, and overall hospital risk management.

"With our recent expansion and facility redesign, we wanted to implement a state-of-the-art communication system that would optimize our staff efficiencies - all with patient safety and satisfaction being a top priority," said Cole Edmonson, Associate Administrator-Patient Services at Medical City. "Emergin gives our nurses the flexibility they need to be more mobile around their unit, streamlines communications so they only have to carry one device instead of five, and gives our patients and their loved ones the peace of mind that the right member of our staff will have instant access to patient information and can make critical decisions no matter where they are in the facility.

"Since Emergin's Clinical Safety System keeps a record of all communications, we are finding that response times have improved, because now our staff has a greater sense of accountability than ever before," added Edmonson. "We even discuss with our patients and their families the technologies we've implemented to ensure their safety and comfort in our facilities."

According to the Joint Council on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), communication deficiencies are the leading cause of failure in patient care. The challenge that healthcare organizations face is that most systems - approximately 90 percent - are not web-services enabled. The Emergin Clinical Safety System has overcome that problem by working with the top vendors in the field to transform their proprietary interfaces into common standards, so that healthcare organizations do not have to wait for vendor conformance, but instead can immediately create an agile, adaptable and future-ready environment.

"By providing communications between disparate clinical and non-clinical systems and by creating an audit trail of that information, we can profoundly improve quality of care and patient safety," said Michael McNeal, president and CEO of Emergin. "Medical City is a prime example of a healthcare facility that is taking the initiative to develop a service-oriented IT infrastructure that brings together best-of-breed technologies and increases staff efficiencies at the same time. The result is a facility where nurses have the security they need to perform their job in an increasingly mobile environment and patients know that they are always under the watchful eye of their medical providers - even when they're not in the same room."

About Emergin, Inc.

Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, Emergin develops a turnkey technology platform that serves as a communications hub for more than 200 disparate technologies, delivering advanced real-time information routing and distribution that improves an organization's communications, staff efficiencies, service quality and safety standards. Through its decade of innovation, Emergin has provided packaged solutions for over 1,000 healthcare organizations, including all three of the last three Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award recipients, 60 of the 180 Magnet Hospitals and six of the Top-10 Heart Hospitals. The Emergin Integration Suite has been licensed by over 5,000 enterprise organizations from around the world. For more information, visit http://www.emergin.com.

About Medical City

Medical City, which has been designated as a Magnet Hospital by the American Nurses Credentialing Center, is a 598-bed tertiary medical center that includes Medical City Children's. Many of Medical City's programs have received national and international recognition, including cardiovascular, craniofacial, oncology, pediatric and transplant services. Medical City ranked 15th out of the 50 "Best Places to Work" in Texas by Texas Monthly magazine in 2006 and the "Best Place to Work" in Dallas in 2004 by the Dallas Business Journal. Dallas Mayor Laura Miller recognized the hospital in 2003 for its history of providing medical care for people in need and for dedicating extensive resources to the betterment of the community. Medical City is a member of the HeartOne program, http://www.heartonetexas.com. Learn more at MedicalCityHospital.com.

Source: Business Wire

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