Universities are not immune to emergencies such as fires, weather crises, mass shootings, and infectious disease outbreaks. The key to combatting these emergencies to the greatest extent possible is preparedness. Administrators, professors, and students must be prepared for anything to happen at any time.
Looking back at the Virginia Tech mass shooting that occurred on April 16, 2007, the first 911 call came in at 7:15 a.m., notifying police there were at least two shooting victims at West Ambler Johnston Hall.
Placing a loved one with Alzheimer’s or any other memory-impairing disease in an assisted senior living environment is sometimes the best and only option for that person. If faced with such a situation, you want to ensure they receive the best possible care and ensure their safety. Therefore, you take a tour, meet with caregivers, and leave a list of phone numbers for a staff member to call in case of emergency. Have you asked how communication flows within the organization?
Let’s be honest, we live in a dangerous world. From school shootings to bomb threats to gang activities, violence is sadly very prevalent today. Luckily, we have the public safety system as well as hospitals and other resources who will do anything and everything they can to help us if the need arises. However, before they can help us, they need to be notified – immediately and accurately. Notifying one police officer if there is a shooter in the local mall is not sufficient notification.
In today’s world, our police departments, fire departments, EMS departments, hospitals, educational institutions, large enterprises, and many others must have the means to reach people promptly when there is an emergency. This involves having a wireless paging software system with complete two-way SMS texting, voice messaging, and fax messaging capabilities to virtually any device.
There is a shooter in the building. A patient is missing. A tornado is seven minutes away. There is a major fire in the building. Enterprises will inevitably face crises. Preparation is key to effective crisis response management. If there is a shooter in the building, the facility is locked down and the police are notified. This scenario should also include a previously prepared, very rapid announcement to the entire staff for everyone to stay where they are, lock the doors, and hide. Being prepared in this situation could save many lives by simply sending a message – if the messaging system itself is effective.
In today’s world, wireless communication is the most effective method of alerting the right people at the right time that there is a crisis. Regardless of the time of day or night, wireless communication ensures that, once notified, team members can work together to effectively respond in a crisis.
In this rapidly advancing technological world, an increasing number of healthcare providers are incorporating electronic health record (EHR) technology. In addition, they are also connecting to health information exchanges more frequently, making patient health information (PHI) more susceptible to online security threats as well as possible HIPAA data breaches.
The convenience of PHI being more accessible to providers also carries the risk of being more accessible to hackers and unauthorized users. Effectively monitoring and managing potential risk is imperative for a healthcare organization. Risk assessments play a key role in staying HIPAA compliant. Mobile devices and ransomware threats are examples of why healthcare providers need to be prudent in their risk analyses. The slightest oversight or lapse could lead to a HIPAA data breach as well as a lengthy, expensive recovery course.
Implementation of Secure Text Messaging (STM) affords healthcare providers a convenient, efficient method to communicate with colleagues in real time. Lab results, medication requests, and test results can all be sent and received via a secure, encrypted text messaging app.
However, implementation alone does not ensure usage of the STM app. Many healthcare providers may be skeptical of the new changes to the existing system. In order to augment adaptation, hospitals need to be driven and encouraging in their efforts to promote usage of the app. An internal marketing campaign, support from the IT department, and positive feedback from users are some ways this can be done.
Not too long ago, the use of mobile devices inside organizations was a foreign and often heavily debated concept. The rapid increase of BYOD integrations and Mobile Application Management (MAM) has become an evolving phenomenon with many personal mobile devices present in the work place.
BYOD offers the capability to support fewer employee network devices, yet still unleashes productivity amid employees and partners. A successful BYOD implementation leverages the organization’s network and gets the best out of consumer technology. In combination with cloud-based applications, personal device expansion, and data center reorganization, BYOD and MAM provide an opportunity for organizations to build the best network design with mobility in mind. Managing BYOD and MAM properly is an integral part of any growth strategy. Organizations that incorporate formal programs and successful training will reap five crucial benefits:
Mobile health technology is transforming the entire healthcare system. The combination of innovative data analytics and mobile technologies are simplifying the methods used by healthcare professionals from the patient care experience to healthcare administration.
Healthcare providers faced obstacles with mobile health technology lacking essential protective measures as they relate to shared patient information, ensuring conformity of mobile devices with EMRs, and concluding which apps were the safest and most effective. Today, the efficacy of mobile health technology has proven successful. With access to a fully optimized, real-time, reliable mobile health app, healthcare providers have immediate access to vital information and the ability to share it with other pertinent team members.
On April 29th, 2016, the Joint Commission announced its new position on patient care through text messaging. This is a tremendous step forward in healthcare communication and will improve many aspects of patient care. At this time, physicians or licensed independent practitioners are able to text orders for patient care, treatment, services to the hospital, or other health care settings if they are using a secure text messaging platform.
The initial stance was that text messaging was not considered safe enough to use in healthcare settings due to unsecured text messages being transmitted via personal mobile phones.
How do you keep your communication flow during a cyber attack? The recent cyber attacks in hospitals are raising many questions about safety and security within many organizations.
CNN just recently reported that Ransomware is growing and that “the FBI received 2,453 complaints about Ransomware hold-ups last year, costing the victims more than $24 million dollars”. CSO Online reported that incident response teams are dealing with 3-4 Ransomware incidents weekly. They also report that ransom requests have increased considerably and that in many cases the cost of recovery is so extreme that the only valid option is to consider payment.
If you have never been to a drag racing event, you are missing the time of your life. You get to walk through the pits and talk to the drivers and mechanics while they are preparing for the race. This is reality at its best. The event itself is an open circus venue with food and beverage vendors surrounding the pit area. It’s a great place to take the whole family!
HipLink is proud to announce that AT&T has accepted the company into its prestigious Global Supplier Diversity Program, which supports our combined commitment to promoting ongoing change.
In 1947, two Wichita, Kansas business partners opened a small auto glass shop. Forty-five years later, the single shop had expanded into a major corporation, with over 1 million windshields manufactured. Today, Safelite Group, Inc. employs almost 6,000 people around the U.S. and operates three major business units: automotive glass fulfillment services, windshield manufacturing, and fleet and insurance claims management services.
HipLink & TCS Offer New Enterprise Grade Communications Solution
Effective communication means having everyone on the same page. However, any time you need to coordinate secure communications across a diverse group — from first responders covering a natural disaster to officials at sporting events to enterprise executives to facilities managers on college campuses — the biggest challenge is ensuring that messages are delivered reliably and securely, regardless of the mobile device they are using. A new partnership between HipLink and TeleCommunication Systems, Inc. (TCS) solves the challenge, cost-effectively with HipLink’s new HipText feature.
HipLink messaging software was the missing piece dispatchers in Tooele County, Utah needed to quickly disseminate text messages to first responders and agency personnel who rely on smartphones and cell phones. “Tooele County is unique,” says Lieutenant Regina Campbell, Communications Officer for Tooele County. “We are home to a large government facility, the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal facility at the U.S. Army Deseret Chemical Depot.”
Previously, dispatchers struggled to reach first responders, consuming valuable time and often failing to reach them in critical situations. But with HipLink in place, dispatchers can now automate the process of sending of outbound messages with virtual certainty of reaching the appropriate first responder.
Grace Hospital is committed to providing the best clinical care to patients with complicated health conditions. It looked to enhance its clinicians’ ability to focus on direct patient care while reducing alarm fatigue and increasing protection of patients’ personal health information. The hospital also wanted to improve the communications between its four locations to increase efficiencies and centralize functions.
If you’ve ever received a voicemail generated from an automated message, you’re likely familiar with the problems that arise. Typically, you’ll only get the tail end of a message and forever lose any essential information that you missed at the start of the recording — which happened while your voicemail message was playing.
