Hawke’s Bay co-designs emergency calls solution

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

https://www.hinz.org.nz/news/635983/Hawkes-Bay-co-designs-emergency-calls-solution.htm

Te Whatu Ora Te Matau a Maui - Hawke’s Bay has replaced pagers with a co-designed emergency call solution.

The new app-based solution has 270 users and has managed more than 550 emergency calls since pagers were retired in November 2022.

In a clinical emergency a staff member anywhere in the hospital can dial a number and the call centre will send out an alert.

Pagers were traditionally used for these emergency notifications, but they are now sent via an emergency calls app.

Ben Duffus, Head of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships at Te Matau a Maui - Hawke’s Bay, says pagers are not a reliable way to manage emergency calls as they do not allow clinicians to acknowledge an alert or for the call centre to see who is responding. Problems could potentially arise if the pager batteries ran out, or pagers were lost or not connected to the right emergency.

The new emergency solution is built on Sense Medical’s Cortex platform. It was co-designed and tested from July through to October 2022 and went fully live across the hospital in November last year.

“Co-designing the solution allowed us to develop product features that optimise an emergency workflow: we were part of the design process,” says Duffus.

“Innovation and strategic partnerships are important , as we look to enable health services locally, regionally and nationally.”

Te Matau a Maui - Hawke’s Bay set up 14 emergency codes in the emergency solution and each one activates a series of steps, which allow the emergency calls centre operator to automatically alert relevant clinicians, who can quickly and easily respond via their app.

The call centre can monitor who is responding and the person who called in the emergency can see who is on their way to help.

All clinical positions are listed along with the current staff member in each role, so users can also see who is in what role or if no one has been assigned.

“This allows the call centre to proactively look for gaps that would cause delays,” Duffus says.

“People have adapted well to the new solution. It provides accountability and it is modern and safer .”

Duffus says they can push alerts onto people’s phones even if they are on silent or ‘do not disturb’.

“As long as the power is on it’s going to get through, which is a critical feature because people often put their phones on silent in a health context,” he explains.

Clinicians log into the calls app on their work-issued iPhones using their network login, or they can also use face ID.

“Early feedback was people were struggling to log on using their phone or were getting timed out, so they built face ID into it. That was a really useful feature that we enabled and another example of us codesigning with our partner to problem solve at pace,” Duffus explains.