In a recent post titled The History and Future of Pagers, we shared our digital health industries insights into the use of and challenges faced with pagers as a communications system.
In the previous post, an outline of potential options that Olinqua’s technology have to support a healthcare facility’s pager journey – whether it is at a User Interface (UI) modernisation or complete transformation stage – was briefly mentioned.
To recap, the two options are:
- The “Modern” Pager via our Messaging Integration Engine which acts as a middleware platform, linking disparate systems and modifying their output to send meaningful alerts to the right people, at the right time.
- Olinqua IGNITE, a unified communication and collaboration system that supports Internet of Things technology, offering connectivity into emerging edge devices that can provide business data for all systems and people to act on.
In this post, we further both options, which can be adapted to any hospital’s “transition from pagers” journey to support effective two-way communications, secure and accurate data, and ongoing network support.
Messaging Integration Engine – connecting disparate hospital systems
For healthcare facilities with resources only to focus on improving the user interface and increase integration options, Olinqua’s Messaging Integration Engine (MIE) acts as a powerful middleware platform to connect into more hospital systems than any other competitor platform.
Traditionally, sharing information between hospitals systems has been a challenge. Particularly when hospital vendors offer disconnected systems – which creates an environment reliant on manual communications and documentation.
With middleware technology today, changes in any given system – such as a code blue – will automatically update other systems and send alerts via phone, paging, nurse call solutions or even medical devices.
Olinqua’s Messaging Integration Engine essentially acts as a middleware platform – receiving messages from different systems, modifying them into formats that can be understood by the receiving systems and then sending them out to all the devices that a healthcare facility uses.
Automating hospital alerts makes sure the right person receives the right message, at the right time. Real time messaging empowers healthcare workers to best respond to team and patient requests, for more connected, smarter and better healthcare.
Benefits of MIE as a paging solution
Through our work in various hospitals that utilises our MIE solution, the following real benefits have been experienced by clinicians and healthcare staff members:
Better user interface: Olinqua’s MIE paging solution offers a friendlier and easier user interface for switchboard operators to manage and for the end users – nurses, doctors, clinicians – to view and respond to. A simpler user interface reduces the cognitive load for healthcare workers and increases the efficiency to respond to pager communications.
More integration opportunities: a Messaging Integration Engine allows more connection to a growing set of external systems that might contribute to better safety and wellbeing of healthcare workers. These include but are not limited to nurse call for code blue, nurse call for code black, building and task management.
Cost and Resource Effective: MIE that interfaces easily with other existing communications and workflow systems helps to reduce the costs associated with building customised integration solutions.
Olinqua IGNITE: a complete digital solution for smarter, safer, and better healthcare
Olinqua’s IGNITE platform does all the traditional, simplistic integration of a Messaging Integration Engine and offers a rich, modern array of mechanisms, allowing connection via API (Application Programming Interfaces), web services etc. and all the required outputs to a hospital’s chosen mobile device – Wi-Fi phones, SMS, a smartphone app, email – and, of course, pagers.
However, IGNITE’s alerting, and messaging capability is simply a commodity subset of the deeper platform’s transformational stance, offering a whole of business benefit, that makes the cost and resource investment far more beneficial than a simple paging replacement.
The Benefits of Olinqua’s IGNITE
At Westmead Hospital in Sydney, St John of God hospitals in Midland (Western Australia) and Bendigo (Victoria) and at the WA Country Health Service, these organisations began their transition from pagers with Olinqua’s IGNITE, which is not only addressing today’s pager challenges – inefficient workflows, ineffective communications, lack of security – but is also providing benefits to the entire business and operations of a hospital, including:
High return on investment: IGNITE covers more of a hospital’s functional requirements than any other single competitor so hospitals can access the full range of our functional coverage, including role-based messaging, critical notifications & mobile duress, workflow management, patient tracking and environment monitoring. When deployed together through a converged web & mobile user experience, return on investment is maximised.
More connected working environment: IGNITE integrates into more hospital systems than any other competitor – offering real time, synchronised communications for more effective and efficient respond to team members and patients’ requests.
Reduced costs and better analytics: Investing in different healthcare technologies with no ability to centrally integrate causes a huge burden in IT management & integration, making it near impossible to leverage data analytics for business improvement. IGNITE can integrate to an array of local data sources and technologies, resulting in “a lot less integration downtime and troubleshooting, resulting in time, cost and resource efficiencies.”
Olinqua IGNITE’s integration network capabilities for hospital environments.
Supporting a healthcare facility’s pager journey
At Olinqua, we believe healthcare leaders and their IT team can support their hospital workforce to continue using their cost-effective paging systems today, whilst also preparing for a modern, connected ecosystem for next generation digital hospitals.
To turn this support into reality our technology offers two solutions – both further adaptable to meet the unique resourcing and requirements of different healthcare facilities:
- Messaging Integration Engine – a “modern” paging system or “modern” middleware platform, allowing for more user-friendly interface and integration capabilities. This solution is suitable for facilities with limited resourcing currently available, yet the drive to begin their transition from pagers.
- Unified communications and collaboration system – such as Olinqua IGNITE that support the Internet of Things, offering connectivity into emerging edge devices that can provide business data for systems and people to act on.
Get in touch for a free consultation
Olinqua’s consulting team are available to further explore your modern paging and/or unified communications and collaboration requirements.
Please get in touch for a free consultation to help you transition from pagers:
