Healthcare facilities are busy places. Staff have a lot of responsibilities, and have to manage a lot of communication challenges. Nurse call systems can alleviate some of that burden and improve communication, enhancing staff efficiency and enabling better patient care. Good nurse call systems integrate well with other systems and are configured with the workflows that help your staff the most. Here are some ways to improve nurse call workflows and increase staff efficiency:

1. Integrate systems and centralize information.
2. Classify clinical and non-clinical requests.
3. Send non-clinical patient requests to non-clinical departments.
4. Set up prioritization and escalation protocols for urgent alerts.
5. Filter out non-urgent alerts.
6. Have protocols for escalating to on-call physicians.
7. Regularly review and audit workflows.

1. Integrate Systems and Centralize Information

When information lives in separate siloes, it can result in miscommunications, missing critical information, or delays in communicating critical information. Systems need to be able to exchange information and communicate important information to the people who need it, when they need it. This is an important consideration for installing life safety and security systems in senior living facilities.

Nurse call systems are most effective when they are integrated seamlessly with other essential systems to create a complete solution that assists staff with every step of the patient journey. By integrating systems and centralizing information, you create a single source of truth when it comes to the information needed to provide optimal care to patients.

This also means that critical information is updated and accessible in real-time. This is a key benefit of integrated systems and sets up a solid foundation for ensuring that alerts are delivered to the right people as quickly as possible, with all of the information that they need to respond.

2. Classify Clinical and Non-Clinical Requests

Responding to patient requests in a timely manner is part of delivering good patient care and improving patient satisfaction. But not all patient requests are clinical or require clinical staff. Instead of lumping requests together, classifying clinical and non-clinical requests can help better categorize requests.

This helps to ensure that alerts are getting to the right people who can handle them efficiently. This can set up a foundation for categorizing and organizing alerts that can help improve nurse call workflows to improve patient satisfaction, improve response times, and increase staff efficiency.

3. Send Non-Clinical Patient Requests to Non-Clinical Departments

In delivering good patient care, clinical staff also tend to take on tasks outside of their clinical duties. This can take time away from direct patient care and negatively impact nursing staff productivity and efficiency, while also increasing the risk of burnout over time.

By identifying and categorizing clinical and non-clinical requests, your nurse call system can send non-clinical patient requests to staff in non-clinical departments. For example, patient requests that need to be handled by maintenance staff, environmental services staff, or another department can be sent directly to the appropriate department without requiring clinical staff to step in to mitigate or transfer that request.

When systems are integrated and set up for communication and collaboration, non-clinical alerts can be distributed seamlessly to the non-clinical staff best-suited to handle those requests. Not only does this type of intelligent routing improve efficiency and response times across departments while giving nurses more time to focus on patient care, but it also improves communication overall, uses efficient delegation to alleviate stress on staff, and improves patient experience.

4. Set Up Prioritization and Escalation For Urgent Alerts

Alerts with no organization or context mean that nurses are bombarded with alerts and can risk missing a critical response window for an urgent alert while responding to an alert that ends up being non-urgent. This can negatively impact patient care and also contribute to alarm fatigue. Your system needs to be able to help differentiate between alerts that are risks to patient safety and those that are not.

Categorizing clinical and non-clinical alerts is one way to improve nurse call workflows, increase staff efficiency, and combat alarm fatigue in healthcare facilities. On top of that, you can also set up prioritization and escalation protocols for urgent alerts. Being able to identify high-priority alerts and ensure those alerts get priority treatment when they are communicated ensures they get the attention they need from the people who need to handle them.

At the same time, having escalation protocols in place ensures that urgent alerts reach the people they need to and are handled in a timely manner, even if an initial notification is missed or someone on the care team cannot respond immediately. This is essential for your hospital’s staff protection, as well as patient care. A process for escalation ensures that notifications reach the right people on the right devices and in the right way, and that other members of the care team can be alerted if a primary caregiver is unavailable.

5. Filter Out Non-Urgent Alerts

Prioritization of calls, color-coded alerts, different audible tones, accessible context and patient information, and more are all essential components of a nurse call system. Just as you want to be able to prioritize urgent alerts, you also want to be able to filter out non-urgent alerts.

Knowing what your team and facility need and looking for these types of capabilities are tips for choosing the best nurse call system for your facility. This isn’t about ignoring patient requests, but it is about setting up your systems to appropriately differentiate between urgent alerts, non-urgent patient requests, and non-urgent, non-clinical alerts.

Non-clinical alerts that are not urgent or regular notification alerts from equipment or monitors should not trigger priority alerts to clinical staff, taking their time and attention away from patients. The ability to reduce false alarms and filter out these non-urgent alerts can ensure your staff is able to stay focused on patient care and on the alerts that do require their time and attention.

6. Have Protocols For Escalating to On-Call Physicians

When care teams span across several departments and different facilities, effectively communicating alerts to the correct on-call clinician can be difficult. With the right nurse call system and workflows in place, it doesn’t have to be.

When a nurse call system is integrated and has an enterprise-wide, web-based directory at its core, it is easy and efficient to see who is on-call in real-time and seamlessly escalate alerts to them when needed without delays.

Protocols and rule-based triggers for escalation protocols can be established and defined for devices with secure messaging and for roles. They can also be customized to take the preferences and needs of various roles and patient care teams into account, all with the goal of ensuring patients get the care needed as quickly and efficiently as possible.

7. Regularly Review and Audit Workflows

Your workflows may be mostly invisible to patients, but they shouldn’t be invisible to your staff. Regularly reviewing workflows and auditing them are key to continuing to improve nurse call workflows and staff efficiency.

The ability to review and analyze incidents to improve security is one of the reasons why you need incident management software. Just as regularly reviewing incidents and auditing existing security protocols improves overall security, doing the same for nurse call workflows helps you make iterative improvements over time. Plus, it allows you to monitor real-time tracking data and analytics for a realistic view of how your workflows are currently performing and have performed historically.

This helps you identify existing bottlenecks and address any existing inefficiencies. It can also help you identify emerging gaps or opportunities for improvement before an incident occurs. Not only does this help you be more proactive in addressing evolving patient care and needs, but it can also help you proactively make improvements to patient experience, which helps improve outcomes, increases patient satisfaction, and can even help hospitals boost HCAHPS scores.

Upgrade Your Nurse Call Systems With NEPPS

When installed and configured correctly, nurse call systems improve patient safety, satisfaction, and care. These are just a few ways to improve nurse call workflows and increase staff efficiency. Having the right systems, integrations, and configurations in place is essential for a comprehensive security solution and can make a big difference for staff and patients.

Partnering with an experienced security systems integrator can help you get the healthcare security solution your facility needs. If you’re looking to add a nurse call system to your facility or upgrade one you have, contact Northeast Protection Partners at 1-800-736-1456.