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What’s the Right Rx for Healthcare Alerts?
Written by Malcolm Carson, Sr. Business Development Manager
Created: May 28, 2015
Hospitals have a constant need to communicate with their staff because of the never-ending
emergencies within the care environment. In the past, they've often relied on the "scream and hope"
method of communicating via public address systems, pagers and telephone calls. Problem is, this
notifies too many people and we are not sure who is responding. That's the idea behind AtHoc’s
Healthcare Alerts, designed to ensure the safety and awareness of healthcare personnel.
Healthcare Alerts provide targeted notifications to all personnel who need to be informed of a critical
event and a mechanism for them to respond to the alert from a desktop pop-up, telephone call, text
message, email or AtHoc’s mobile app. These alerts can be sent to thousands or a team of only a few.
Let's walk through a couple of typical examples within a hospital.
A cardiac arrest occurs in the intensive care unit. Instead of announcing it over the public address
system – scaring everyone throughout the hospital – the operator simply triggers a scenario in the
AtHoc system, selects the location from a drop-down box and clicks publish. Immediately, a notification
goes out to all members of the arrest response team. The team members acknowledge that they are
responding. The operator sees the responses and knows that help is on the way.
Or, let’s say there is a mass casualty event. Using another preprogrammed scenario, the operator recalls
surgical teams while notifying hospital administers of the situation – all within minutes of the incident.
Using the mobile app, the operator can even pinpoint locations for team members to report. The
incident commanders immediately know who has been notified and their ability to respond.
With AtHoc's Alerts, hospitals can target those to be notified, confidently know who is responding and
direct responders where to report; all without alarming patients, visitors or staff.
Whether it is a medical emergency, natural disaster, weather event, clinical system outage or an
aggressive intruder, AtHoc helps ensure you’ll always be able to target the right people – and only the
right people – while having a firm grasp of the evolving situation using unified communication and
control.

2. This is just one aspect of the healthcare alerting challenge. Truth is, there are a wide variety of other
emergencies that can occur within a healthcare facility – and anywhere else healthcare workers care for
those who need it. Get a comprehensive look at the healthcare crisis communication challenge: read
this brief and engaging article.