Healthcare Technology Featured Article

April 28, 2010

Healthcare Technology and News: GE Healthcare and Ascom Team Up For an Enhanced Mobile Clinician Communications and Clinical Workflow


The right coordination and communication between health care providers can save lives of the patients, whereas a lack of such coordination can become costly for the hospitals. Recently Spyglass Consulting Group brought this issue under public focus by reporting on how incompatible hospital communications systems make it difficult for nurses to effectively communicate wirelessly. The recent tie-up between GE Healthcare and Ascom Wireless Solutions is expected to significantly address this serious challenge faced by the health care sector.

GE Healthcare and Ascom Wireless Solutions came together to launch a wireless hospital-wide messaging system. The partnership is expected to improve workflow and communication for healthcare providers.

The agreement aligns the GE Healthcare patient monitoring platform with Ascom's wireless communication solutions. The alignment will enable hospitals to customize, filter and send secondary alarms to clinicians' Ascom Voice over IP (VoIP) phones, pagers and Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) handsets.

On-the-move medical professionals need to stay in constant touch with the nurses and other care givers and need to access patient data on a constant basis. This type of smooth communication helps the doctors and care- givers take critical-care decisions in near real-time. According to Spyglass report, 66 percent of hospitals have the necessary communication infrastructure. The Spyglass report revealed that 66 percent of hospitals based nurses said their organizations had deployed VoIP-based communications to enable greater mobility, so they can perform their jobs more efficiently at the point of care.

The current agreement between GE and Ascom is aimed at turning streams of disparate patient monitoring information into an improved clinical workflow for mobile caregivers. By interfacing wireless hardware and middleware with patient monitoring devices, GE Healthcare and Ascom offer hospitals a "one-stop" solution for wireless secondary alarm management. Mobile hospital-wide secondary alarm notifications, via automated text messaging or paging, offer enhancements to workflow by providing clinicians with clinical information anywhere throughout the hospital.

Ascom- GE Healthcare partnership will allow the hospital staff better manage their time and that would translate into better customer satisfaction, hopes Fritz Mumenthaler, the General Manager of the Wireless Solution Division and member of the Ascom Group Executive Board.

“Ascom sees GE Healthcare as an important clinical partner where we add mobility to the medical information.The cooperation between GE Healthcare and Ascom will allow hospital staff to better manage their time to increase patient satisfaction,” Mumenthaler said.

GE relies on the expertise of Ascom for its world class on-site wireless communication systems and hopes that its partnership with Ascom will result in valuable productivity gains.

“Increasingly, hospitals are leveraging wireless technologies to deliver clinical data directly to mobile devices, leading to valuable productivity gains. By collaborating with Ascom, a global leader in on-site wireless communication systems, GE Healthcare is working to advance hospital alarm management and build on our vision to provide excellent access to quality patient information from most communication devices,” David Ataide, Vice President and General Manager of Monitoring Solutions and Diagnostic Cardiology, GE Healthcare, said.


Madhubanti Rudra is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Alice Straight
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