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EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION
South Carolina, is another example of a medical institution that found an innovative way to establish an effective, automated Code Red emergency mass notification system. Upon initial review, Car- olinas HealthCare System found that its system was complex and consisted of a manually intensive process. “When we analyzed it, the time it took from alarm to overhead page and email notification was too long, and the message was not consistent and concise,” said Bret Martin, director of Fire, Life Safety, and Utilities at Carolinas HealthCare System. Many medical centers follow “defend-in-place” procedures, which means patients aren’t immediately evacuated in the event of a fire alarm, and trained staff is directed to respond as soon as possible to the alarm origination. So, concise, timely notification is a very important factor in an emergency situation.
In an effort to elicit a quicker response, Carolinas HealthCare System partnered with Alertus to create a solution that would moni- tor the fire alarm panel, receive fire alarm events, and activate an im- mediate emergency alert.
“The system had to have the capability to read a truncated mes- sage from the fire alarm panel, convert it to an intelligible plain text language, and distribute it through all the multi-modality means of communication that we currently used—one of which was digital, in-house paging,” said Martin. This would allow for immediate, comprehensive emergency notification to all emergency response in- dividuals through multiple alerting devices including smart devices, text messaging, email, pagers, and computer pop-up screens.
Text-to-speech was another component that Carolinas HealthCare System needed to make its emergency communications more effective.
“We wanted the Alertus system to use existing overhead pag- ing systems in each of the facilities so that it would broadcast the Code Red message in accordance with the criteria established by our authorities having jurisdiction,” said Martin. “All of these com- ponents were critical to making sure that the system increased the reliability, responsiveness and accuracy over what we had with a manual process.”
Identifying organizational needs and existing gaps in emergency communication are the first steps in establishing
a comprehensive emergency notification process.
From there, building a system with components
that meet those needs will help organizations de-
velop a more secure and methodical process for
notifying everyone in an emergency.
Go to sp.hotims.com and enter 16 for product information.
Greg Smith is the public relations manager at Alertus Technologies.
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