Nurses and other clinicians have long relied on overhead pages to communicate with physicians scattered across hospitals. Providing a quiet environment for patients, as a result, has been a difficult aim for most hospitals to achieve. Luckily, the technology now exists for clinicians to quickly and quietly communicate with physicians.

By utilizing a secure messaging, mHealth app for clinical staff, this hospital was able to make a significant dent in their noise levels, uplift patient satisfaction and immediately improve their HCAHPS scores:

“Vineland was the pilot site in early summer of 2015 and by August all three hospitals were live on quiet secure texting. Pacek hasn’t forgotten how loud it really could get. He recalls trying to create a 10-minute video and it took several days because of constant overhead interruptions. Now, “it’s eerily quiet walking through the halls these days,” he says.

 

The Elmer medical center is a small facility and had the highest patient satisfaction rate for quietness before the communications system went in at 60 percent; now it approaches 100 percent. Woodbury went from a 45 percent satisfaction rate to 56 percent, and Vineland increased from 55 percent to 62 percent.

 

Currently licensed for up to 1,800 users, overall costs for the communications system total about $200,000, Pacek says, which includes 3,000 licenses so the system can expand the base of users as needed across the delivery system. The price, he acknowledges, was on the lower end compared with other vendors considered, “but it’s a small company with smart people who can easily modify the system for us.”

 

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