Wayne Memorial Hospital Selects Extension to Automate Nursing Communications

EXTENSION INC. (Fort Wayne, Ind.) announced that Wayne Memorial Hospital, in Goldsboro, N.C., has implemented the nurse call integration feature of the EXTENSION HealthAlert for Nurses solution. The 316-bed facility has worked hard to earn a reputation for providing excellent state-of-the-art care. With these factors in mind, Wayne chose EXTENSION’s HealthAlert for Nurses solution to automate the delivery of clinical information and nurse call messages.

Wayne Memorial Hospital needed to optimize clinical workflows on their new Cisco 7925 handsets and to upgrade their methods of communication to track messages delivered, and chose EXTENSION because of its seamless integration with Cisco’s Unified Communications infrastructure, MediTech EMR, as well as the Rauland-Borg Responder 4 nurse call system.

The EXTENSION HealthAlert nurse call integration feature was implemented to replace the outdated pagers in the Oncology department. Wayne also lacked visibility into whether a message was delivered, accepted, declined, etc. In addition, the nurses at Wayne desired more context-rich alerts appropriate for clinical decision-making and management sought to improve clinical workflows by eliminating the need for a unit secretary to serve as an intermediary between nurse and patient. EXTENSION connected Wayne’s communications infrastructure and its health information systems with the EXTENSION server-based appliance and 250 Cisco IP handsets to take full advantage of the existing architecture and to enhance the relevance of the data retrieved from the various systems.