My Adult Children Never Call … They Only Text

by John Elms, CEO

Many of us have adult children. Mine have entered, or are entering, their 30s. While neither has chosen a clinical profession, they are akin to the young women and men who are pursuing the nursing and affiliated care-giving professions. Most came of age in the era of AOL Instant Messenger and follow on applications like Instagram, Snapchat and others. What unifies them is that they favor text over voice communications by a vast majority.

Some nurse call manufacturers opt to turn every button press by a patient into a phone call. “It speeds response” is their claim. “Bunk!” I say. This is nothing more than one-size-fits-all simplified engineering to my eyes, especially if the company’s DNA is dominated by hardware genes.

Studies show that 64% of all nurse call requests do not require an RN. Imagine that more than half of all calls made to a nurse equate to “sorry, wrong number.”

Imagine further that a nurse is attending to a critical patient. Her phone rings from a different patient who has a non-critical need. She waits 45 seconds or so for the phone to stop ringing thinking “will this thing ever stop?” Meanwhile, the patient she is caring for is thinking “isn’t she going to answer that call? What if it was me?” How is that helpful to staff and patient satisfaction?

Some nurse call manufacturers opt to turn every button press by a patient into a phone call. “It speeds response” is their claim. “Bunk!” I say.

There is a better way.

At Critical Alert, we natively integrate to all the major clinical communication and collaboration platforms. We deliver context-rich textual notifications to the caregiver, and provide the opportunity to accept, reject (escalate) and call back to the patient room if a conversation is needed. All without the need for expensive middleware.

Moreover, with Critical Alert’s lightweight, flexible and software-based platform, the 64% of calls that do not require a nurse can be automatically routed to the non-clinical staff best equipped to serve the patients’ needs. In this way, your care givers can focus on the important tasks for which they are trained and best suited.

So, the next time you are walking the halls of a hospital and hear a phone ringing, ask yourself “is all that noise really necessary?”