Extension Healthcare, a company that specializes in solutions for alarm safety, will showcase its Engage Mobile alarm management platform at the upcoming AAMI conference in Denver June 5–8. Designed to reduce clinical interruptions for hospital staff by delivering alerts to smartphones and badges, the system has been successfully adopted by St Joseph Hospital in Denver. In April, Brian McAlpine, Extension Healthcare’s vice president of product management and marketing, spoke to 24×7 about the features of the platform.
“Engage Mobile is revolutionizing the way that nurses receive and respond to alarms, alerts, and other notifications,” said Todd Plesko, CEO of Extension Healthcare. “A clinical communications model that lacks a comprehensive platform to manage the various medical devices, clinical systems, and messages deployed to mobile phones will inevitably create a cognitively taxing environment resulting in interruption fatigue for nurses.”
The Joint Commission’s National Patient Safety Goal on alarm safety requires hospitals to have a plan in place to manage alarm fatigue by January 1, 2016. However, less attention has been paid to clinical interruptions not tied to medical devices. According to Extension Healthcare, those interruptions—such as requests for assistance from other nursing staff or ringing phones—can prove just as disruptive as alarms, and potentially as dangerous to patients. McAlpine says his company works with hospitals to suppress unnecessary alarms, ensuring that only critical messages are passed through to staff.
At St Joseph Hospital, the facility relies on fully integrated nurse call and transport alerts from Hill-Rom, patient monitor alarms from Philips Intellivue, Early Warning Scoring alerts from Philips Guardian, and patient engagement pain requests from GetwellNetwork. The Extension Engage platform collects, organizes, and transmits necessary alarms and alerts to clinical staff via Vocera voice badges and Spectralink Pivot Android smartphones. Along with message text, the system also displays relevant context related to the patient and event and response options that include text messaging.
For more information, visit the Extension Healthcare booth (#234) at AAMI.