Sentara implements EXTENSION clinical alerting solution for NICU nurses

EXTENSION, INC. announced today that Sentara Princess Anne Hospital in Virginia Beach, VA has successfully implemented its advanced clinical workflow solutions for nursing staff in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). EXTENSION has integrated more than 200 Cisco 7925 IP handsets with Sentara's Rauland-Borg Responder 5 Nurse Call System to automatically deliver critical alerts. EXTENSION has also integrated with Philips Monitors in the NICU to deliver a variety of alerts relating to an infant's vital signs including heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen, and more.

"Patient care and satisfaction are our primary goals," said Betsy Meadows, Director of Enterprise Network Services. "We had a limited amount of time to choose and implement a solution that could effectively meet our specific clinical needs. EXTENSION worked with us to make it happen quickly, and also provided us with a foundation that we can build upon to improve communications in other departments in the future."

In many healthcare facilities, the NICU is an open room and nurses moving about the unit rely on the audible alarms generated by the patient monitors for notification of a problem. When Sentara opened its new facility in August 2011, the NICU was designed with individual rooms to provide a quieter healing environment for its infant patients.

This improvement required additional planning since nurses would now be separated from the audible alerts of the patient monitors reporting any critical changes in an infant's vitals. The nurses at Sentara needed mobility throughout the unit while continuing to closely monitor their patients. After considering alternatives, Sentara chose to implement the Nurse Call Integration feature of EXTENSION's award-winning clinical alerting solution.

"Our nurses were apprehensive about migrating from a centralized NICU to a private NICU, but after 6 months of using EXTENSION's clinical alerting solutions without any adverse events the staff has complete confidence that they will get the critical alerts they need", said Paige Crunk, Director of Patient Care Services - Family Maternity Center. Sentara's NICU Clinical Manager, Nikki Lowery, added, "Our nurses, IT staff, and EXTENSION workflow experts collaborated to make sure the workflows were defined to meet our specific patient, family, and staff needs. The outcome is that our clinical and phones systems are seamlessly integrated, our nurses have peace of mind that they are receiving the right alerts in a timely fashion, and our patients and their families are happy".

EXTENSION's Vice President of Sales, Bill Sterling, noted, "We are honored to be working with such a prestigious health system that embraces cutting edge technology. We look forward to future collaboration with Sentara's clinical and IT staff to introduce new innovative workflow solutions that will further enhance clinical and financial outcomes."