Hospitals, among all healthcare institutions, tend to have some of the most demanding interactions with disasters. In most hospitals in Canada, this is called a code orange. An external disaster expected to bring multiple patients in for treatment. Therefore hospitals around the world are focusing more and more on strengthening their emergency management options. In the 21st century, it is only natural that hospitals will be looking for digital engagement/communication technology to power up their code orange response systems.
Digital code orange response systems are not a new idea. The days are long gone when hospital administrations manually informed everyone about critical situations. In the age of digital enhancement, hospital administrations can handle nearly all emergency situations by using automated solutions. Every day, more solutions are being innovated to ensure hospitals’ code orange response systems work optimally because often it is a matter life and death.
Code orange response automation is one of these groundbreaking solutions.
This solution deals with one of the most critical situations hospitals can face: slow response in the face of disaster. Hospitals always make sure that backups are available if any situation escalates and, in many cases, backups of backups are also kept ready just in case! There are always, unfortunately, those unexpected scenarios when hospital administrations need more resources immediately. In these cases, reaching out to staff using a manual recall process is not a viable solution because it takes time and keeps administration staff busy when they could be performing other important tasks.
With an automated employee recall solution, hospital emergency administrations can send automated recall-to-duty messages to all staff at once. Staff can respond to code orange messages if they are available to come into work. In this way, emergency managers can assemble teams of additional resources in the shortest amount of time possible, while also making sure that resource mobilization is highly optimized.
Sounds a bit complicated, doesn’t it? Here is an example to make it easier to follow:
Hospital ABC has a skilled team of doctors, surgeons, nurses, technicians, and paramedics to handle any type of incident. In the early hours of the morning, a plane goes down. Military, first aid, and medical personnel have been called up to help. Due to this mass casualty event and the multiple injuries reported, Hospital ABC needs additional resources to deal with the influx of patients.
Let’s say they need five more doctors, five more surgeons, 10 more nurses, 10 more technicians, and 20 more paramedics. They have the resources; they just don’t have them currently on site. What can the hospital emergency management team do? Do they go through a manual request process by calling personnel one by one and seeing if they are available? Do they activate a phone tree with many people trying to relay the same message to others?
Or should they use an automated code orange recall solution to send emergency code orange messages to all the off-site staff and allow them to respond immediately?
Certainly, the second option is the most viable because it saves time, makes the code orange recall process more efficient, and helps emergency managers to optimally mobilize resources and assemble a team of skilled professionals in the shortest possible time.
How to Set Up a Hospital Staff Recall Solution
Well, the most critical steps of setting up an automated, digital code orange recall solution are having a strategy, figuring out the set of tasks needed to build the recall process, and finally, finding out the right digital tools to build the perfect code orange recall process. It is a big job, since it involves a lot of technical labor and skills.
Fortunately, hospitals do not have to build this solution from scratch.
SimplyCast anticipated the growing need for an automated recall solution and built a ready-to-go code orange recall system that can be customized for every single hospital.
All you need to do is to follow these basic steps to get your code orange recall solution ready:
Step 1: Central Staff Contact Registry
A central staff registry is a collection of all hospital staff information stored in a single database, connected to all your communication tools. Hospitals need to make sure every single staff member’s information is in the system, such as their name, contact information, job title, skills, certifications, etc.
Accurately building a central staff contact registry is important because when you are sending code orange recall messages to a specific group of staff, the system will use the information from this registry. SimplyCast has a built-in database that can be used as a central staff contact registry.
Step 2: Templated Message & Responder Types
Once the staff registry is completed, users can plan for the various types of code orange incidents that may occur (usually based on past records) and build recall messaging templates for each of these incident types. They can also identify responder types based on what types of additional resources may be required.
For instance, users can create a recall message for any Burn Unit emergency and set burn specialist doctors, technicians, nurses, and surgeons as the necessary responder types. Having these templated messages ready is so useful because in the case of a code orange, hospital administration staff do not need to spend time writing out a message. They can simply find the right pre-built recall campaign and launch it (after making slight changes if needed).
Step 3: Multi-channel Options
This is also an important step to complete because in case of severe situations, hospital emergency managers can choose to send code orange recall messages via multiple communication channels. For instance, they can send messages to responders via SMS, email, and voice messages. Some staff may have preferences when it comes to communication. The preferred-channel option allows emergency managers to send recall messages automatically using the method that is most likely to get the attention of responders.
Step 4: Recall Confirmation
This is a two-way confirmation step. When a code orange recall message is sent, responders can confirm their availability by taking instant actions. For example, if they get a recall message via SMS, they can simply reply Yes or No. For email, they can simply click on the link corresponding with their answer. If it’s a voice message, they can press a specific button on their dial pad to respond. Similarly, when they send response to the emergency management team, responding staff will get an automated confirmation message thanking them for being available.
The best part is, when the code orange recall campaign is successful and a team is assembled with the required number of personnel, the recall can be closed either manually or automatically. The same can be done for individual groups of responders. For instance, if the threshold of five doctors is met, any other doctors who respond to the recall message will be notified that no more doctors are needed and to remain on standby. However, if other responder types have yet to reach the threshold number, they will still be able to accept responses.
Step 5: Reports and Metrics
Finally, it’s important for the hospital code orange team to understand how a recall campaign is going. Using SimplyCast’s automated solution, they can see the number of personnel responding in real time. They can also view detailed reports of each campaign including the total recall time, individual staff group response times, and other metrics. These insights can be used to help the team see any areas where resources may be lacking and whether another recall needs to be launched.
Why SimplyCast?
So, there it is! You have a complete, digital engagement-powered code orange recall solution.
As mentioned before, it is completely customizable technology so you can tweak the solution to meet your hospital’s specific requirements. We have used our in-house Recall solution and incorporated our SMS, Email, Voice Broadcasting, and CRM software to build this solution.
Don’t worry about scalability and security! SimplyCast is an ISO 27001:2013-certified company with data centers in the USA and Canada. This means we can assure you that your medical data is safe on our secure server and the messages you transmit are completely encrypted. Our platform has the capacity of sending nearly 100,000+ messages every hour and allows 10,000+ concurrent sessions. We can also get additional gateways and servers if you need.
Most importantly, we have an astounding 99.5% minimum uptime. With our emergency staff recall solution, you can have peace of mind.
Interested?
Don’t wait! Our experts are ready to give you a one-on-one demo to explain how this solution works.
Simply request a demo by clicking the button below and let us show you how our solution can help you manage your code orange recall system more efficiently.
