Case Study: Healthcare

HipLink's mobile solution lets us extend various enterprise data to IS technicians, physicians and administrators today; and provides a solid foundation enabling us to continue to mobilize more mission-critical information down the road.
— Client Services Manager, Banner Health Systems

PROBLEM: The hospital administrator was concerned about the mounting labor costs associated with on-floor caregivers managing multiple pages to other caregivers located inside or outside the facility during emergencies. The outside service used for this function was an expense coming under scrutiny in the spirit of cost cutting.

These situations were happening when caregivers paged other specialists for more than one patient need, especially to summon those outside their facility. By manually monitoring paging responses to ensure patient coverage, the nurse, doctor or other healthcare professional spends 5 to 20 minutes concerned with the issue, estimated to cost over 10 minutes of productivity. For the average healthcare workers tending to hundreds of these incidents each per year at this hospital, this cost the hospital in excess of one person’s average fully loaded salary of about $72,000 per year, consistent with a portion of the Hospital’s annual overtime pay. The outside paging agencies know this problem all too well and are set up to manage these pages to multiple locations, by multiple means, reaching the professional at scheduled or unscheduled times. This service costs thousands of dollars per month for Hospital run professional practices.

What they needed was a pre-determined way of repeating messages to unanswered pages and involving a backup resource after that. Without requiring a person to manage the pages for the patient need, that caregiver is now free to tend to the next potential emergency or task, while looking only for the results of the paging sequence. A record of all pages, responses and results was also a requirement. To further reduce monthly costs, the Hospital wanted to be less dependent on an outsourced paging service.

SOLUTION: HipLink's easy to configure panel allowed the Hospital Administrator and staff to configure their unique process for patient coverage of emergencies of several types. Upon one action, HipLink sent pages multiple times and provide grouping, escalation and other convenient functions to realize their procedures. HipLink also provided multiple messengers, or ways to send the pages, so they were not simply dependent on just one system, since the software is configurable to automatically try by other means. The benefits of HipLink:

• Lower Operation Costs
• Increase Profits by Improving Billing
• Increase Productivity of Medical Staff
• Lower Liabilities
• Increase the Level of Patient Care
• Reduce Loss of Employee
• Reduce Response Time
• More reliable communication with “On-Call” staff to reduce employee absences, increasing profits received from revenue-generating employees.
• Reduce Alert Time
• Lower administration, management and IT costs through automation and managed messaging
• Reduce dependency on Email Server to get critical messages.