Agility and efficiency are imperatives for every healthcare organization—and recent years have increased pressures to do more, more quickly.
To keep pace, many healthcare organizations have deployed a complex web of solutions and devices, including electronic health record (EHR) software, mobile applications, and other clinical systems. If these technologies don’t work in concert, care teams may miss critical communications, and patient outcomes suffer.
While standardizing clinical systems can address this challenge, that approach is not always feasible. The reason? Replacing vital applications—such as EHR, nurse call, and physiological monitoring alarms—may be too disruptive and compromise patient care.
The good news is that healthcare organizations can keep their existing solutions and devices and unite them via middleware. Standardizing on middleware enables communications and connectivity between applications that weren’t designed to work together to deliver performance breakthroughs.
To learn more about how TigerConnect improves care delivery through smarter notifications, reach out to us at any time with questions or to request a demo.
Standardizing on Middleware Maximizes Value of Your Existing Systems
Technology experts sometimes refer to middleware as “software glue.” By design, middleware supports different technical architectures to streamline integration between disparate systems. For acute care organizations, deploying middleware, such as TigerConnect’s Alarm Management and Event Notification, lets you maximize the value of your EHR, mobile application, and nurse call deployments.
#1: Maximize Your EHR Deployment
As of 2017, 96% of all non-federal acute care hospitals in the US had adopted certified EHR systems, according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). If you’re one of the many health systems invested in EHR, you want to keep your solution in place for years to achieve a low total cost of ownership.
TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notification lets you extract even more value from your EHR by linking it to other critical systems. You can streamline your staff assignment process, contextualize your alerts and alarm notifications, and deliver critical lab results directly into the hands of the care providers that need them.
#2: Maximize Your Mobile Application Deployment
Communication between nurses and other clinical team members can’t slow down. Chances are, you already have a mobile application deployment in place for your team that gets the job done. If it works, why replace it? Implementing new solutions can be costly, time-consuming, and disruptive.
Instead of replacing your existing mobile solution, you can amplify its value. With TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notification, you can receive alarms, alerts, and notifications from your EHR, nurse call system, physiological monitors, and other clinical solutions. This approach empowers team members to receive actionable, context-rich notifications on mobile devices to drive intelligent clinical decision-making.
As an added benefit, you can link your mobile application to your PBX systems to allow call-back into the room from any mobile device. That way, caregivers can intervene in sentinel events, such as falls to protect patient safety. Caregivers can respond efficiently to patient requests, improving the patient experience and leading to higher HCAHPS scores.
#3: Maximize Your Nurse Call Deployment
Today, many health systems find that their nurse call systems don’t meet their mobile, reporting, or clinical collaboration needs. But replacing these systems is a massive expense that most health systems can’t bear. Here’s why: The UL 1069 safety standard for hospital signaling and nurse call equipment requires the complete replacement of wiring and headend equipment. Even if you just choose to update software, you’ll still face weeks of construction and downtime.
With TigerConnect, you can move ahead with best-practice mobile and clinical collaboration strategies and keep your legacy nurse call system in place, even if it’s old. Not only will you improve information flow, but you can also access advanced analytics to supplement your current nurse call system reporting features for improved decision-making.
TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notification Platform
The TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notification platform was purpose-built with the exclusive communications and workflow needs of acute care organizations in mind. As the healthcare industry’s first next-generation communications platform, it delivers enterprise-level integrations that let you unite patient communications, alarms and event notifications, clinical workflows, and real-time analytics on a single dashboard.
The platform pulls in event types from patient rooms, normalizes and prioritizes this event data, and sends context-rich alerts directly to the right care team member’s mobile device. As a result, team members can make informed, data-backed decisions and take prompt action to optimize patient care.
High-Availability and Multi-Tenant Architecture
Acute care organizations are 24/7 operations that can’t afford lengthy downtimes. That’s why TigerConnected designed our Alarm Management and Event Notification platform using advanced technology that delivers 99.99% reliability. With TigerConnect, you can minimize planned and unplanned downtimes and avoid disruptions that tax your IT staff, care teams, and patients.
Our software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution features a multi-tenant architecture, an approach that allows multiple users, or tenants, to use a single instance of an application simultaneously. As a result, your organization benefits from an extensible, scalable solution that lets your team share resources, communicate, and collaborate while keeping costs in check.
Interoperability At Our Core
TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notification platform uses standards-based integration protocols instead of relying on proprietary standards. What does this mean for you? Proprietary interfaces require specialized IT knowledge and can involve significant effort and expense to make changes.
Our standards-based approach allows an agile integration process that brings together disparate systems, including nurse call, mobile applications, EHR, smart beds, laboratory information system (LIS), and real-time location systems (RTLS). You can opt for scalable cloud-based or licensed-based models to meet your requirements without the high cost of a proprietary solution.
Enterprise Workflow Flexibility
TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notification lets you streamline your clinical workflows to optimize efficiency across your enterprise. You can configure workflows, priorities, and notifications for each caregiver in each unit. Additionally, you can use our staff assignment functionality to simplify the process of assigning caregivers to patients and rooms with an eye towards workload balance. TigerConnect can also share staff assignments with other applications, such as your EHR, to reduce repetitive manual data entry.
With an improved workflow, your team can deliver faster, more informed care to assigned patients, allowing greater job satisfaction and lowering stress. Your IT department will value TigerConnect’s user-configurable workflow, which means less reliance on vendors to make changes and promotes authentic, enterprise-grade scalability.
Real-Time Analytics for Continuous Improvement Insights
The TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notification solution combines patient event data from multiple systems, including nurse call applications, medical devices, smart beds, LIS, and EHR. You gain essential context on patient behavior, workflow effectiveness, and care team efficiency metrics.
Equipped with insights on patient behavior and activity, your clinical leaders can identify problem patients, and balance care delivery approaches. This leads to better overall management of the patient population and decreases fulfillment times.
Self-Serviceability
One of the main advantages of middleware is keeping various systems in place and allowing them to work together. With cyber-secure middleware, you gain intuitive, user-friendly workflows and an extensive, pre-built library of integrations with reputable clinical applications, along with an enhanced analytics engine. As a result, you can integrate select legacy systems while replacing others with a single, cost-effective SaaS-based platform.
By empowering users to self-manage workflows and relying on industry-standard integrations, TigerConnect provides you with advanced functionality while reducing the burden on your IT team. Improving clinical care while enhancing the patient experience and controlling costs are all within reach when you deploy TigerConnect’s Alarm Management and Event Notification Platform.
Becoming a Real-Time Health System with Middleware
Recent years have seen the fast pace of healthcare accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Many acute care organizations experienced care surges that demanded innovation and swift action, often at a high cost. It’s no surprise to learn that a recent survey found 82% of healthcare organizations are looking for ways to manage costs without sacrificing clinical excellence.
The only way to adapt to today’s high-intensity healthcare realities is by ensuring your hospital systems can share clinical and patient data in real-time. Since a full-scale system replacement is cost-prohibitive, deploying middleware is a clear way forward. Middleware, such as TigerConnect’s Alarm Management and Event Notification, lets you keep some legacy systems in place while replacing others. You can achieve measurable cost savings while transforming into a true real-time health system.
TigerConnect’s Alarm Management and Event Notification middleware is a game-changing platform that sits at the nexus of patient communications, clinical workflow, and real-time analytics. Request a demo to learn how this game-changing platform can transform your healthcare operations.
