Health care facilities face the constant challenge of delivering optimal services while increasing efficiencies and controlling costs. Attempts to bridge the clinical and business divide have created new philosophies, policies and programs to ensure the best patient outcomes. For example, collaborative care promotes a cross-functional model of delivering high-quality care over an individual expert, siloed approach. Integration also is the key to getting rid of technology silos, taking your facility from reactionary to strategic in regard to patient safety, workflow and more. Without integration, synergies—including fiscal synergy—don’t exist.
The numerous systems in a healthcare facility, ranging from fire and access control to code blue and infant abduction, all include alarm and notification capabilities, but most operate independently. Although many are redundant, duplication increases maintenance costs, reducing each system’s ROI.
When an emergency occurs – and one inevitably will, because that’s the nature of this business—confusion and panic often follow, as do communication breakdowns, delayed responses and costly mistakes. The first minutes of an emergency are critical in determining outcomes, so ignorance isn’t an option when a lack of information or disruptions in its flow can endanger lives. Unification of disparate systems is the key to fast, efficient emergency alerting and response management.
Read more about unifying life safety, security and environmental systems for situational awareness, so your facility can set the right response plans in motion. Although this article in Facility Care speaks to health care settings, the same principles apply for centralized monitoring, alerting and reporting for any type of facility.
