Is Your Hospital’s Communications System Ready for the Next Big Emergency?
Emergency managers should be utilizing the communication technologies that have advanced dramatically in recent years.
At the same time, it’s absolutely critical that your hospital’s emergency communications are synchronized with local first responder agencies during emergencies. That usually means coordinating with local agencies as you implement a service, as Northwell did.
“All the local players in emergency response use Mutualink, so if there’s an incident in the community, I can open up a bigger radio channel,” he says. “Rather than having to go through a liaison, I can pull in the police frequency or they can pull me in and we can talk directly to the people handling the incident before they get to our hospital.”
Martino also stresses the importance of redundancy in emergency notific
ations. Northwell Health asks employees about their preferences for methods of notification and personalizes alerts accordingly.
“It’s all multimodal, so we try to employ multiple devices for our message,” Martino explains. “We try to reach you on your app, but if we can’t get you with those, we’ll send a text message or phone call, but we can always back that up with an email or with desktop alerts. There’s no one answer to everything. There are multiple pieces to the puzzle.”
Warren also encourages hospital officials to look at multi-platform solutions that include the methods Martino mentioned in addition to overhead paging, earpieces for officers and even personal computer integration.
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All these options can provide an important resource for emergency managers, but if there’s only one person who knows how to operate the system, it can only be so effective. That’s why Martino says Northwell uses the system everyday with its staff at different hospitals.
“We use our system for day-to-day things like communication between response teams, medical recalls and for geolocational purposes,” he says. “We’ve had patient transfers within Northwell Health where our security department will handle the transport and security personnel at the destination hospital can receive updates on the way to make sure everything’s going off without a hitch.”
Final Product Eliminates ‘Grapevine Effect’
A fully functioning emergency communications system gives managers an all in one tool to understand every side of a developing situation and to execute the best possible responses.
“You want to give all the relevant information to all the relevant people as quickly as possible,” Wright says. “It’s about giving all the actors affected by an incident an enhanced situational awareness.”
Situational awareness should always be a priority for security officials, but it’s especially important during emergencies.
“By their very nature, emergency situations are very fluid and dynamic,” Warren warns. “Without real time, up-to-the-second details and effective two-way communication capabilities, poor decisions can be made.”
Warren references lag time in information sharing as a potentially lethal problem in emergency communications, which brings us back to the telephone game.
Emergency managers should aim to get their messages across as quickly and directly as possible, because emergencies are no time for games.
“Emergency communications systems should eliminate that grapevine effect,” Wright says. “Where the 911 operator is talking to the telecommunicator who talks to security personnel who update the manager.”
The question is: Is your hospital still playing the telephone game?
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