In 2010, officials at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Ore., realized the facility needed a paging system that was on par with the standard of care it was known for. The existing system was two decades old and consisted of several components from various manufacturers that had been pieced together over the years.

“The most significant issue that needed to be addressed was the sound quality and the need for louder paging for emergencies,” says Jim Gainer, the medical center’s manager of TSS instrumentation. Facility staff and stakeholders saw the need for a system that could deliver reliable and improved intelligibility, so that every critical page would be clear and understandable. In addition, they wanted a unified, networked system that could accommodate the medical center’s future requirements for expansion and safety.

The existing system posed some major issues that needed to be addressed. Due to the inconsistent sound quality of pages and the fact that some were being randomly dropped, staff had lost confidence in the system’s reliability – a serious safety consideration given the critical nature of code pages.

The existing system also lacked supervision capabilities, which meant it was difficult to pinpoint and fix glitches and failures. There was no comprehensive set of reference schematics that tracked the wiring and layout of the paging system throughout the facility. Information was piecemeal at best.

Finally, the system as it existed would not be able to meet the medical center’s future needs. The center needed a system that would allow for the expansion of additional zone paging and paging from remote and multiple locations, logging of paging activities and life safety interface.

Previous Equipment Had Major Wiring Issues
Providence St. Vincent Medical Center took action and contracted Integrated Systems Group (ISG) to install a new solution. ISG Account Manager Erik McCarty and his colleagues conceptualized the installation of the new system in three phases.

They selected Vocia from Biamp Systems. Vocia is built on a decentralized networked architecture, and provides a critical paging and voice evacuation system that’s expandable and scalable.

As the team at ISG assessed the existing system in order to develop a replacement, they found dead-end wires that were not connected to anything, broken and cut wires that had not been working, and wires that had been spliced inappropriately for use with other devices. This created a web of cabling that would make it difficult to trace a failure. Additionally, since the existing system lacked line monitoring, it never generated warnings about any of these issues.

While installing the new system during phase one, ISG added supervision of speaker runs on several of the facility’s floors, with expansion of the supervision to be performed in later phases. The contractor also eliminated many of the paging amplifiers that had previously been scattered throughout the facility and centralized them in a single location. The new system, McCarty says, provides greater versatility, functionality and reliability.

“Having a quality digital paging system with supervision, reporting and alarm capabilities provides assurance to the staff at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center that the system will be there for them when they most need it,” he adds.
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New Solution Has Improved Sound Quality
With phase one of the project complete, phase two is set to begin in early 2011. Already, the new system has provided  reliable, supervised paging with improved sound quality and intelligibility, options for expanded paging capabilities and life safety interface, system monitoring and ease of maintenance. It uses distributed intelligence, a flexible network architecture and an intuitive software interface – all of which creates a supervision system that allows the medical center staff to find and fix problems much more quickly.

The new system, which includes 12 paging stations throughout the facility, provides monitoring of speaker runs, so during a future expansion, it will be easy for any installer – even a new team of people – to pick up and continue where the first phase left off. The new system also has clean, secure wire runs, so the nests of dead-end, broken and cut wires in the old system are now a thing of the past.

“The benefits of phase one are being experienced every day,” Gainer says. “Critical pages now have clearer, more consistent sound quality, and staff can confidently rely on the new system.”

“We know the subsequent phases of the installation will provide even greater versatility and flexibility,” he says. “We will have complete oversight of the whole campus so we can proactively address any problems or issues that might arise.”

Campus at a Glance
Hospital: Providence St. Vincent Medical Center is a 523-bed facility located in Portland, Ore. The center serves nearly 400 patients per day and has 4,240 staff members. It is a designated nurse magnet facility.

Challenge: The existing paging system, which was more than two decades old and pieced together from disparate equipment, was inconsistent, unreliable, and wouldn’t meet the facility’s future expansion and life-safety interface requirements.

Solution: The Vocia critical paging and voice evacuation system has been installed in the first of three phases. In phase one, 12 paging stations were installed.

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