AmeriTech provides enterprise technology solutions and support for healthcare organizations. Their Care Management and Information Systems use wireless technologies to improve nurse efficiency by up to 50% per shift by enabling easier access to patient information. This extra time allows nurses to spend more time with patients, improving care quality. The systems also provide benefits like improved quality assurance and patient safety by more closely monitoring patients. Healthcare organizations face challenges like rising costs and tight budgets requiring them to improve efficiency and productivity while enhancing patient care. Integrating new technologies into areas like nurse call systems can help by streamlining workflows and improving information access and communication to better monitor and treat patients.

1. SERVICE BRIEF
Healthcare Patient Care & Technology
AmeriTech provides Enterprise Technology Solutions and Support
AmeriTech- Healthcare Improve Patient Care
Care Management and Information Systems
Hospitals are trying to address the nursing shortage with better staffing levels, more
flexible scheduling and higher salaries. But it is also necessary to reduce the time
nurses spend on administration, paperwork and other indirect tasks-and to increase
the time they spend at their patients’ bedside. No single solution will immediately
improve nurse recruitment and retention. However, better communications and easier
access to relevant information can go a long way to addressing the issues that have
aggravated the nursing shortage. Advanced nurse call systems provide the tools
enabling performance improvement initiatives.
“Care Management and Information Systems” provide significant workflow productivity tools and benefits.
Wireless telephony further supports the patient safety initiative of the named nurse, providing up to a 50%
efficiency dividends for each nurse for each shift and in addition, provides a similar efficiency dividends for
doctors enabling a saving of approximately $3 Million per medium sized hospital per annum.
Accompanying the workflow and efficiency dividends from the
Care Management and Information System provides significant
benefits from improved QA and patient safety. This is specially
enabled by associating the efficiency dividend with more time for
nurses to spend with patients, doing what they are trained to do
– giving care. This care giving is proven to provide reductions in
secondary infections like pneumonia and enhance the detection
rates of MRSA and hence detecting and reacting to patients
drifting off protocol, which leads to reductions in patient days
further enhancing hospital efficiency.
HEALTHCARE

2. AmeriTech - Healthcare Technology & Integration
Technology Increases Productivity & Improves Patient Care
Looking at the unprecedented fundamental challenge faced by the Health Care Industry, how to cope with ever-increasing
patient numbers in the face of rising operational costs and tight budgets? This challenge will continue for the rest of this
decade.
The demand for healthcare services is dramatically increasing – due mainly to a growth in
the senior population and the number of chronically ill patients requiring continued care. Yet
there is a significant reduction in government tax collections and citizens with private health
care to afford a medical health system where cost are approaching 15% of GDP and continue
to grow at 5% pa. The global financial crisis has exposed the health care industries rapidly
increasing costs as unaffordable for a majority of OECD countries and developing counties.
To overcome the financial crisis and reduced government budgets, hospitals need to increase both efficiency and
productivity to optimize the balance of costs to the provider and benefits to the patient. To add to that complexity, many
governments are changing policy and regulatory framework of the healthcare industry, leading to a growth in consumer-
driven healthcare where patients are viewed as customers.
As a result, healthcare organizations need to improve their service to appease patient satisfaction,
improve patient safety and quality of care. They need to improve efficiency of medical device
interconnectivity, enabling access to the right information, at the right time. They need to reduce
waiting and treatment times. And they need a better method of caring for patients after they leave
the hospital. Furthermore, there are pressing internal issues such as ensuring staff satisfaction,
retention and increasing productivity levels. The health care industry is desperate to find ways to
boost productivity within hospitals whilst improving patient safety.
The medical devices industry, network IT device mobility industry and the nurse call / life safety systems industries are
currently experiencing significant technology convergence. This technology convergence is accelerating to meet demand
for, workflow productivity, QA, reporting, efficiency and patient safety. However the legacy Nurse Call Systems, and some
current technology nurse call systems provide nothing more than a basic life safety system. These system technologies are
analogous to “Florence Nightingale’s 1860 system of telling a patient to ring the bell if you need me”. That’s one hundred
and fifty years (150) with no real improvement in patient safety delivered by life safety systems.
SERVICE BRIEF
Healthcare Patient Care & Technology
AmeriTech provides Enterprise Technology Solutions and Support
HEALTHCARE

3. Health Care IT departments are struggling to keep pace with the rate of new medical
devices which are being developed and need to connect to their hospital network. Legacy
medical device systems and life safety systems operate on private networks, which were
designed, installed and supported by the device or systems vendor. This approach required
hospitals to assume some responsibility for supporting life critical applications themselves.
This created a new issues as one thousand-bed hospital system, on the US east coast
“discovered” over 200 private networks. For many good administrative reasons, the wide
spread duplication and proliferation of private networks is cost prohibitive and does not
deliver the required efficiencies and interoperability.
Hospital Electronic Medical Records will further add to IT departments desire for further acceleration
and simplification of technology convergence driving the enterprise network which will enable the
integration and automation of medical devices, through gateways with low level and high level HL7
interfaces to be recorded as the patient record. Consequently, regulators like the FDA are focusing
on ways to reduce compliance so health can benefit from medical device connectivity.
Middleware messaging systems – the systems that deliver interoperability and enable convergence –
will have to handle a range of industry devices to keep up with the
proliferation of cheap medical devices. As the basic light and buzzer nurse call companies
fail to develop and deploy middleware connectivity to rapidly changing wireless and wired
medical monitoring devices like heart rate monitors, pulse oximeters ventilators, infusion
pumps etc. will fail to deliver that life safety capability. Conversely, nurse call systems with
interconnecting middleware will integrate everything from; wireless devices, radio devices,
VoIP devices and direct connected network devices. And pass those messages (life safety,
alarms, reporting, event notification etc, to the responsible person – no matter what
messaging device they carry (email, wireless phone GSM phone, email or paper report) will
dominate the market.
The role of the nurse call system will be to take all patient initiated, device initiated, asset
initiate and system initiated calls and send them to the right person, whether, clinical (various competencies), nursing
support, admin or management. This division of labor and allocation of responsibility and accountability will drive the
efficiency outcome, the government or shareholders or owners are demanding. To ensure these benefits are realized IT
departments and CIO’s will take increasingly more control of the nurse call purchasing and rollout cycle.
Recently, some nurse call companies have invested more than $4 million dollars into the production of middleware
connectivity only to find this type of development is more costly and complex than they assumed and with nothing to show
for their investment. And yet other companies are scrambling to acquire or merge with middleware suppliers. (Phillips
and Emergin for example). Some companies may never breach that technology chasm. NIQ with CarePlus has a 5 to 10 year
lead on these basic light and buzzer systems nurse call systems with our nurse call and middleware in a box approach.
More than half the annual $16 billion market share will soon be dominated by nurse call providers who make the jump to
medical device connectivity integrated into the life safety system of nurse call. Only those nurse call systems that can
deliver these benefits will survive the remainder of this decade. Thus nurse call systems will morph into messaging handling
systems by the end of the decade and the basic nurse call system aka Florence Nightingale bell and buzzer systems will be
dead.