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CLIENT SPOTLIGHT:
PROVIDENCE HEALTHCARE CHOOSES CONNEXALL® BY GLOBESTAR SYSTEMS TO INTEGRATE WITH NURSE CALL AND ALARM SYSTEMS


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Wendy Eddington and her team know their business. As Director of Information and Communication Technology for Providence Healthcare, Wendy has an in-depth understanding of the unique, ongoing communications requirements for her organization. Providence Hospital is the third largest rehabilitation and complex continuing care hospital in Ontario. Located in Toronto, this leading health care facility specializes in rehabilitation for patients who have experienced strokes, orthopaedic surgery, or lower limb amputation, or who require specialized geriatric rehabilitation, assessment and treatment. Providence also has a highly respected long-term care home, The Cardinal Ambrozic Houses of Providence.

In response to staff concerns about the reliability of its Nurse Call and Patient Safety systems, Wendy's team was tasked with upgrading the aging Companion wireless phone system which was an integral component in the House's Nurse Call alerting system. The system was also a primary means of communication between staff in the House's sprawling 288-bed home. The staff wanted a 100 per cent reliable system that could handle any type of alert, reduce the number of devices they carried and improve their efficiency and responses to residents' needs.

Meeting Client Needs

It was determined that these objectives would be best met by integrating the Houses' nurse call and other monitoring systems with a wireless information delivery network. In other words, equip Providence's caregivers with a more fully featured wireless phone system, allowing them to receive the resident's alert notifications at any location in the 16 "houses." The Houses' staff requested a system that ensured every call bell request had a guaranteed delivery to the resident's own clinical care team irrespective of shift and staffing changes or temporary off-line phones (e.g. when swapping in a newly charged battery).

The upgrade was complicated by the need to keep the old system operating while virtually every infrastructure component - from the network switches and routers through to the PBX - was upgraded.

Wendy's team took an extremely thorough and disciplined approach to assessing the best integration solution for the Houses. The team conducted a comprehensive assessment of its current staff workflow prior to searching for a solution. Wendy and her team meticulously documented all system needs and "must haves." Any new system would need to be sold to a variety of internal stakeholders within the hospital.

According to Wendy, "as we investigated the problems with the current system, we'd discuss how the new system should ideally operate. However, once we began examining the available solutions, we found none of them could enable our 'ideal' design. We also encountered vendors that were not familiar with the nuances of the systems they were proposing so they couldn't explain exactly how the applications would work in our environment. We needed to understand all deviations from our specifications so we could address them with the staff, residents and families prior to implementing the new design. So when vendors couldn't explain how their proposal dealt with specific functions or design elements, we began to think that our conceptual design simply could not be realized with the systems available to us. That is, until we saw ConnexALL® in action."

Raul Sinimae, Network Services Supervisor, commented, "We were impressed by the technical expertise of the GlobeStar team demonstrating the software to us. Not only did ConnexALL® meet 100 per cent of our "must have" features, Globestar was willing to add our list of "really nice to haves" to the system - such as different ring tones for the different levels of escalation. During our very first meeting, they answered all of our questions - both high-level and detailed technical - to our complete satisfaction.

"GlobeStar understood the nuances of our current nurse workflow and call systems."

"GlobeStar understood the nuances of our current nurse workflow and call systems," said Eddington. "We knew that a successful system installation was dependent upon the vendor understanding specific healthcare applications and needs and it was clear that GlobeStar understood both."

The ConnexALL® Solution

ConnexALL® integration workflow software would be used to integrate with five disparate systems:

  • A proprietary networked nurse call system

  • SpectraLink IP wireless telephone system

  • Wide area pager system

  • An in-house email server used to relay outgoing email notifications

  • An in-house database server to facilitate Real-time activity data and custom end-user reporting

Providence's staff members would be required to respond to various types of alerts including call bell, cord-out, bath, assist and fire. All alerts would be received on SpectraLink NetLink wireless phones. In essence, ConnexALL® would act as the "glue" that tied the systems to the devices.

Specifically, Wendy's team used ConnexALL® to integrate the Houses of Providence's existing Rauland Responder IV Nurse Call System with 60 wireless phones. When a resident sends an alert, real-time notification is delivered directly to the appropriate staff person's handset, regardless of where they are situated in the home. This eliminates the need to disseminate alert information from a single receiving point and physically locate a nurse to tend to a resident's needs. Ultimately, alert response times will be dramatically reduced and resident care quality would improve significantly.

ConnexALL® Integration Connection Diagram for Providence Healthcare
Click Here to view the diagram in a new window.

Providence's target response times range between 3 and 5 minutes depending on alert type. ConnexALL® provides automatic alert escalation, ensuring alerts are received by an alternate caregiver if the primary caregiver is already engaged. Providence wanted the different levels of escalation to be easily identifiable so Globestar created a ring-tone cadence system for Providence's ConnexALL®, providing unique rings for the primary, secondary and back-up escalations. Providence also utilizes ConnexALL®'s unique automated scheduling application which allows for the redirection of alerts to specified phones when an employee goes on his or her scheduled break. A predetermined swing-shift schedule was implemented. Wendy pointed out that "ConnexALL® solved various workflow problems and eased the administration of changing staff-to resident assignments

Implementation, Training and Support

"Since training new staff is an on-going concern," noted Charmaine Chui, Business Analyst for Providence, "we produced a training video to educate new staff on how to properly use and care for the phones and charge and change batteries. We also provided laminated Lanyard cards for staff which gave them a readily accessible 'directory' of the wireless phone numbers and list of common "How to" features such as unlocking the phone keypad." This was clearly a testament to Providence's commitment to ensuring that their newly implemented systems were properly utilized and maintained in a consistent manner by all staff.

"Ongoing access to GlobeStar's technical team was a competitive advantage during the evaluation and implementation stages."

"Ongoing access to GlobeStar's technical team was a competitive advantage during the system evaluation, installation and implementation stages," said Wendy. "The accessibility of the Globestar technical team and their commitment to our success was evident. The project encompassed multiple vendors and various manufacturers' equipment. Yet each time we encountered an interface issue or unusual behaviour, Globestar was very responsive, assisting us and our other vendors with troubleshooting and resolving the issue, even if the problem was clearly originating outside ConnexALL®. Wendy commented that a healthy dose of humour was also a welcome part of her team's ongoing communications with the GlobeStar team.

Wendy's requirement for a flexible system that could evolve with her facility's needs also had to be addressed. "We weren't looking for an off-the-shelf solution. We needed the system to handle other critical alerts such as Patient Safety and smoke alarms. GlobeStar either already accommodated these needs or was willing to add the additional solution features as they became necessary. The company also worked with us to define troubleshooting methodologies specific to our environment. "The ConnexALL® product and the entire Globestar team are highly regarded by ICT and we consider ConnexALL to be an integral part of our communications strategy."

As Providence continues down its path of fully integrating all facility systems with ConnexALL®, it is currently looking at incorporating patient wandering and access control applications into its state-of-the art system. They also plan to expand the wireless infrastructure into the Hospital side of the complex. "GlobeStar's implementation team provided exceptional expertise and commitment during what was often a very challenging systems overhaul. Not only did ConnexALL® meet our organization's immediate integration demands, we feel it can meet our ever-growing long-term needs as well."