Improving Point-of-Care Communication
Denis Baker, CIO of the 806-bed Sarasota Memorial Hospital, faced these same challenge when his organization’s mobile communications solution failed and he had to come up with an alternate solution to improve clinician to clinician communication.Sarasota Memorial Hospital’s Story Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Florida’s second largest acute-care public hospital, adopted communication badge technology about eight years ago and deployed 1,000 badges to nurses and other staff. After a while, many issues around device management and hardware support resulted on both the vendor’s side as well as the hospital’s side. The badges were considered disposable by the vendor, says Baker, and it didn’t provide any infrastructure for repairs and poor hardware support. Instead, the vendor relied on a reseller network to support repair. For instance, Baker says, if he sent the reseller 100 devices, only 20 would come back to be fixed. Once a badge would stop working, there was a tendency by nurses to stop using it and throw it in a drawer.Soon ongoing utilization fell by the wayside, as Sarasota Memorial’s wireless network was showing its age, not being able to handle the added burden of data and VOIP capabilities. With high number of disconnects, nursing management eventually stopped supporting the badges, so utilization ground to a halt. Baker had to think of an alternative to shore up communication at the bedside.Find out what technology Baker ended up employing at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in part-two of this blog.