TigerConnect’s Alarm Management and Event Notification Solution Mitigates “Alarm Fatigue” in Demanding Clinical Environments
FDA-cleared solution enables converged healthcare communication and collaboration for providers struggling with staffing shortages and caregiver burnout
SANTA MONICA, Calif., Oct. 26, 2021 — TigerConnect, maker of healthcare’s most powerful healthcare collaboration suite, today announced that its TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notification is mitigating “alarm fatigue” in demanding clinical environments. Sitting at the nexus of patient communications and clinical workflows, the FDA-cleared Alarm Management and Event Notification solution modernizes and streamlines the methods used to alert care teams to patient need and status. The converged healthcare communication and collaboration solution is thus able to reduce unnecessary clinical interruptions, enabling caregivers to focus on patient care rather than get burned out by numerous, minor alarms — a phenomenon that can have serious consequences for patient care outcomes.
“As hospitals confront chronic staffing shortages and drops in revenue from reduced elective procedures, they face pressure to work more efficiently. But they also want to keep nurses front and center as they consider the workload and mental health stress caused by notification fatigue,” said Dr. Will O’Connor, TigerConnect chief medical information officer. “Solving this problem is core to TigerConnect’s mission. We’re gratified to see how our Alarm Management & Event notification solution is solving some of the biggest care delivery challenges facing healthcare organizations today.”
Risks of Unnecessary Clinical Interruptions
Today physicians, nurses, and other caregivers are inundated with alerts from different clinical systems, leading to stress and sub-optimal care outcomes. Nurses are disproportionately affected by clinical interruptions, according to a Journal of Patient Safety study. Frequent interruptions can lead to medical errors, lapses in patient care, or even death. The NIH estimates that preventable adverse events, such as medication errors, lead to nearly 100,000 deaths a year and cost the US healthcare system over $20 billion annually. Improved alert management, which reduces interruptions and distractions on the care team, can ameliorate the severity of this problem.
Alarm Management and Event Notification in Action
TigerConnect has successfully deployed Alarm Management and Event Notification at numerous client sites across the United States. These include an 850-bed health system in the northeast, which has connected Rauland Responder IV & V, Stanley Healthcare RTLS, and Philips & Masimo monitors to the TigerConnect Clinical Collaboration Platform on iOS. A 100-bed medical center, also in the northeast, replaced their middleware offering and connected the TigerConnect Clinical Collaboration Platform including Alarm Management and Event Notification to a nurse call system, Stanley Healthcare RTLS, and Mindray physiological monitors on Zebra Phones.
TigerConnect has similarly installed its solutions at a midwestern 500-bed medical center, 200 and 600-bed medical centers in the west, and a 60-bed university medical center. The care teams at these sites are experiencing drops in alarm volume and a corresponding improvement in staff focus.
Converging Alerts, Alarms, and Events into a Single Platform
With the cloud-native Alarm Management and Event Notification solution, part of a 2020 acquisition, healthcare providers can converge their alerts, alarms, and events in a single, scalable, rules-based workflow platform. The solution seamlessly fuses care team collaboration with alarm management and event notification. TigerConnect consumes alerts and alarms from EHRs, nurse call solutions, physiological monitors, real-time location services, lab information systems, and smart beds. Users can take advantage of a single user interface to further improve their operational efficiencies and continuous improvement processes.
Maximizing Investments in Existing Clinical Systems
TigerConnect makes it possible for healthcare providers to maximize investments in their existing clinical systems, such as Electronic Health Records systems while reaping additional benefits. They can modernize their communication and collaboration capabilities by leveraging TigerConnect’s platform, integration engine, advanced clinical workflow builder, and staff assignment client—coupled with a world-class clinical workflow analytics solution.
“With TigerConnect, you may not have to replace your various clinical systems in order to upgrade feature-sets, integrations, or reporting capabilities,” says John Elms, TigerConnect chief product officer. “Your IT teams can deploy our modern, cybersecure middleware, providing an intuitive end-user UX, an extensive library of integrations, and enhanced analytics engine at a fraction of the cost. Your teams can also consolidate vendors, replacing costly SMAs and other service agreement schemas with a single, SaaS-based approach.”
TigerConnect’s unique software architecture offers cloud-based scalability, cybersecurity, high availability, and multi-tenancy to hospitals and healthcare enterprises. By buying only what they need, hospitals and healthcare enterprises can strategically scale over time, with purpose-built flexibility, reliability, and a low total cost of ownership.
Elms continued, “TigerConnect has continued to iterate our rules-based application in the cloud to more efficiently integrate hospitals’ existing clinical systems. Rather than standardizing on single-vendor clinical systems, TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notification standardizes on flexible, scalable software, empowering hospitals to leverage their tech investments rather than rip and replace.”
About TigerConnect
TigerConnect transforms healthcare with the industry’s most widely adopted clinical collaboration platform – uniquely modernizing the way doctors, nurses, care teams, patients, and data connect. With solutions spanning care communication, patient engagement, scheduling, alarm notifications, nurse call, and more, TigerConnect accelerates productivity, reduces costs, and improves patient outcomes, safely and securely. Trusted by more than 7,000 healthcare organizations for user-friendly, yet enterprise-ready solutions, TigerConnect delivers 99.99% verifiable uptime for more than 10 million messages each day. To learn more about TigerConnect, visit www.tigerconnect.com.