Nurse Call Systems - Serving the Healthcare Industry

Our unique electronic Nurse Call "communication delivery system designed to improve patient care and satisfaction by reducing costs and increasing efficiencies with functionally rich applications and state-of-the-art technology that supports outstanding patient care."

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Centralized Nurse Call - It's All About Patient Satisfaction

There are three operational modes of nurse call.

Traditional Operational Mode

The first mode is Traditional. This is simply where the patient presses a call button, which in turn illuminates a dome light in the hall outside the room and simultaneously signals the nurse station. The unit secretary answers the call (if she's at the nurse station) then attempts to contact the appropriate care giver.

Common complaints about this method are:

• inefficiency, too long to respond to the patient request
• does not make best use of highly trained nurses' time
• adds to the noise on the unit, disrupting the healing environment and often making it difficult for patients to sleep
• higher upfront cost to install because master stations / call answer terminals are required at every nurse station

Despite these problems, Traditional mode is by far the most prevalent operating mode utilized in most hospitals.

Unattended Operational Mode

In this mode, patient calls do not signal the nurse's station but instead pages or calls the nurse associated with that patient.

Before explaining what is wrong with this let me point out an important fact. 47% of all patient calls have do not require an RN! Another 18% have nothing to do with any kind of caregiver!

Examples of non-nurse related calls are:

• requests for bedpan
• requests for food / beverage
• request for blanket
• Is the pastor on the floor?

In Unattended mode, nurses are required to triage their patients' calls. What's wrong with this? There is a nursing shortage! A Nurse should not be interrupted from providing care that is essential to their patients by responding to requests for soda that can be taken care of by an Aide.

Why would anyone put their highly trained nurses in charge of triaging their own calls when we now know that the response to more then half of those calls can be handled by others?

Centralized Nurse Call

What we want to talk about now is Centralized Nurse Call. In this scenario, all patient calls throughout an entire hospital ring to a central location or call center. Depending on the size of the hospital and call volume, the call center can be staffed with one or two highly trained operators.

With Intego Pronet.net, operators are a mere click away from every patient's assigned RN, LPN, and / or CNA. The operators triage the call and send a detailed message to the alphanumeric pager of the appropriate care giver or aide. Code Blue or Emergency calls are priority and get answered before all other calls.

Advantages of this system are:

• RNs perform only tasks that require an RN (administer pain medication, etc)
• Hospital units enjoy a reduction in the amount of noise on the floor enhancing the environment of healing
• Caregivers get to the patient faster resulting in increased patient satisfaction
• Increased staff efficiency
• Lower upfront cost to install, master stations are not required at every nurse station
• Lower total cost of ownership

Lowest total cost of ownership?

A 600-bed hospital in Illinois conducted a study and found that the increased efficiencies of Centralized Nurse Call saved their hospital $55,000 per month! That's more than $600,000 per year in operating costs!

We mentioned that caregivers get to the patient faster. Our studies have shown some key differences in response times between traditional nurse call and centralized nurse call environments.

Average time to answer a call:

• Traditional 90 seconds
• Centralized 25 seconds

Average time for caregiver to reach the patient:

• Traditional 11 minutes
• Centralized 5 minutes

Not only does the nurse get to the patient faster, but she arrives at the patient's bedside already knowing what that patient needs. No more going to the patient room to find out what the patient wants, then walking back down the hall to retrieve the pain med, then walking back to the room to administer the medicine. The nurse simply arrives with the pain med and administers it!

Other companies claim that their systems can operate in Centralized Mode, but the reality is that they are extremely limited. Intego has more Centralized nurse call systems installed in the United States than all of our competitors combined times five! Call Echo 24 to arrange a live demonstration of this powerful system.