GE Healthcare, Ascom collaborate to launch wireless hospital-wide messaging system

GE Healthcare and Ascom Wireless Solutions today released plans to launch a wireless hospital-wide messaging system, to improve workflow and communication for healthcare providers. The agreement aligns the GE Healthcare patient monitoring platform with Ascom's wireless communication solutions to 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. This addresses challenges recently reported by Spyglass Consulting Group—incompatible hospital communications systems make it difficult for nurses to effectively communicate wirelessly.

“Healthcare Without Bounds: Point of Care Communications for Nursing”

Caregivers are highly mobile, yet require access to patient data to support critical-care decisions in near real-time. According to a recent Spyglass Consulting Group report, 66 percent of hospital-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.

GE Healthcare and Ascom are committed to 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 sees GE Healthcare as an important clinical partner where we add mobility to the medical information," said Fritz Mumenthaler, General Manager of the Wireless Solution Division and member of the Ascom Group Executive Board. "The cooperation between GE Healthcare and Ascom will allow hospital staff to better manage their time to increase patient satisfaction."

"Increasingly, hospitals are leveraging wireless technologies to deliver clinical data directly to mobile devices, leading to valuable productivity gains," said David Ataide, Vice President and General Manager of Monitoring Solutions and Diagnostic Cardiology, GE Healthcare. "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."