Hospital emergency codes are in place to alert staff of the various emergency situations that medical institutions must be prepared to handle. Many hospitals make use of a system of standardized codes—most commonly a color code system. Not just limited to the event of a life threatening medical emergency, this color code system includes instances such as code pink for pediatric cardiac arrest, code orange for external disasters, code silver for an active shooter, code black for a bomb threat, code blue for cardiac arrest, and code green for a precautionary or crisis evacuation event. These standardized codes are used to alert staff promptly that an emergency must be dealt with.
What Can Our Digital Process do for You?
Code green emergencies are very complex to manage efficiently due to the logistics involved with evacuating all hospital personnel, patients, and visitors. A few hospital emergency codes such as code silver may result in a call for evacuation, so it’s best to be prepared.
Panic soon takes over in a critical situation, leading to poor communication and unexpected dangers in the chaos. This is only compounded if a hospital relies on manual processes to alert staff and next of kin; in instances such as an active shooter on the premises, time wasted could result in a needless loss of life. SimplyCast makes things easy with powerful alerts and advanced response-based tracking, all through one convenient centralized dashboard that keeps you in control.
Hospital emergency administrations can send automated messages to staff and instantly alert them of the evacuation, and our live responses feature enables your staff to reach out to other hospitals to accommodate critical care patients. Staff on the ground can also utilize live responses to communicate updates to emergency managers as the situation unfolds, allowing your team to strategize and mobilize in real time.
How Does it Work?
Let’s check out an example:
Sage Hospital requires a full evacuation, but alerting the patients, visitors, and staff all at once would cause distress, which will likely result in further injuries and possible fatalities. Sage Hospital’s administration team knows a calm, orderly evacuation is paramount to patient safety, so they use SimplyCast’s platform to send a discreet message to staff who immediately take charge of the situation.
While this is happening, administration team also utilizes SimplyCast's live survey and response tracking features to request vital resources from other hospitals, all while monitoring the central dashboard for status updates from hospital staff members as each area is evacuated safely. With the central dashboard, administrators are prepared to launch any other alerts or backup plans as the situation changes, meaning that Sage Hospital can stay ready no matter what comes their way.
SimplyCast’s ready-to-go code green evacuation system can be customized for every single hospital. Here's how:
Step 1: Build Crisis Alerts
The alerts you send out will help hospital staff, patients, and visitors navigate an emergency evacuation, so we advise having your administration team set them up ahead of time. Begin with an alert template for a code green situation that will trigger staff protocols, followed by other measures to ensure patient and staff safety.
By templating the alert messages, you ensure consistent, concise, and accurate communication. By building crisis alerts ahead of time, you ensure that key messages can be triggered with the click of a single button.
Step 2: Build Live Surveys
Next, we advise you to anticipate what you might need from other medical institutions during an evacuation and have your administration team build live surveys requesting aid. These can be sent instantly, allowing you to query all the hospitals or other institutions in the area regarding bed space, medical supplies, or even additional available ambulances. This allows you to maintain vital services for critical care patients.
Step 3: Activate Alert
Once everything is prebuilt, you’re ready to test the alert. This is a vital step that gives you peace of mind, as you’ll know the alerts will work perfectly in an emergency.
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Your administration team should trigger the alert to instruct hospital staff to begin evacuation protocols and send out live surveys to request aid from other hospitals, such as beds for critical care patients. All it takes is one click.
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Your administration team should monitor the central dashboard to track responses and updates from hospital staff in real time. Hospital staff should keep the administration team informed about changes such as successfully evacuated areas, off-limits areas, and headcounts at the designated evacuation meeting area.
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After the situation has been resolved, your administration team should send another alert to inform hospital staff that it is safe to re-enter the building.
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Further alerts should be sent to other hospitals to let them know that critical care patients can return and to thank them for their cooperation.
Step 4: Review Process
Your administration team should review the reports generated after the event to assess your staff’s emergency response and identify any issues, then ensure any necessary changes are made. In this way, they can continue to improve the system’s effectiveness, expedite future response times, and be ready in the event of another evacuation alert.
Why SimplyCast?
The SimplyCast platform is a no-code platform that is fully customizable and can be tweaked or altered to meet the exact needs of every medical facility. Our platform can also be applied to other standardized codes in the hospital code system.
SimplyCast is an ISO 27001:2013-certified company with data centers in the USA and Canada. This means we can assure you that your confidential data is safe on our secure server and the messages you transmit are completely encrypted. Our platform can send over 100,000 messages every hour and allows for over 10,000 concurrent sessions. We can also acquire additional gateways and servers if you need them.
Most importantly, we have a 99.5 percent minimum uptime. With our solution, you can have peace of mind.
Interested in Improving Your Code Green Response?
Don’t wait! Our experts are ready to give you a one-on-one demo to explain how this solution works. We also have more use cases for other hospital emergency codes, like code amber for missing child emergencies where a possible child abduction or infant abduction has occurred, code silver for an active shooter, code orange for external disasters, code pink for an infant cardiac event, code blue for cardiac arrests, and code black for bomb threats.
Simply request a demo by clicking the button below and let us show you how our solution can help you manage your emergency response more efficiently.
