Gwinnett Medical Improves Mobile Communications and Emergency Notification

Amcom Software, Inc. announced that Gwinnett Medical Center has chosen Amcom solutions to help improve nurse communications and emergency notification capabilities for the mobile staff at their facilities in Lawrenceville, Ga.

The organization believes that its strategies will strengthen its mobile communications capabilities by bringing together several technologies in an integrated framework. Gwinnett Medical has selected Amcom Software's e.Notify emergency notification solution for time-sensitive communications.

"One of our key goals is to reduce average heart attack patient treatment time for patients," says Gwinnett Medical Center Telecommunication Analyst Lu Black. "We want to better manage Code STEMI alerts for these patients in our new Strickland Heart Center and we believe that Amcom's emergency notification solution will help us achieve that goal."

The e.Notify solution will also be used to notify staff for trauma cases and send alerts to the cardiovascular operating room teams, enabling the hospital to quickly call them together as needed.

"We're excited about the benefits possible with e.Notify," Black said. "We'll be able to reach all the right people simultaneously. Because the solution will be completely integrated with our Amcom on-call schedule we can call only those on duty, reach them on any number of preferred devices, track their responses, send instructions and even escalate the call if needed."

The nursing staff at Gwinnett Medical also uses the Amcom Messenger clinical alerting system, which is integrated with their nurse call system. The nurses receive alerts on their wireless phones, including automated notifications of scheduled patient care. Gwinnett Medical expects this to enhance communication to and among nurses so they can work smarter and eliminate wasted effort.

With the facility's use of the Amcom web-based on-call scheduling system, the hospital reduced the amount of overhead paging required each month from 14,000 pages to only about 100 from knowing which staff members are on-call, where they are and how they prefer to be alerted. The hospital has also used software and cellular devices to shave between four and five minutes off the time needed to have a page sent and received.