Hospitals, among all healthcare institutions, tend to see more emergency situations because they are the hub of healthcare within a particular area. This is why hospitals around the world are focusing more and more on strengthening their emergency management policies and procedures. In the 21st century, it is only natural that hospitals will be looking for digital engagement/communication technology to power up their emergency management systems.
Digital emergency management 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’ emergency resource management systems work optimally because oftentimes it is about life and death.
Hospital staff recall automation is one of those groundbreaking solutions.
This solution deals with one of the most critical situations hospitals can face: a lack of available resources. 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! But then again, there are always those unexpected scenarios when hospital administrations need more resources immediately. In these cases, reaching out to staff by 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 messages if they are available to come into work. In this way, emergency managers can assemble 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 for you to make it easier to understand:
Say, Hospital ABC has a skilled team of doctors, surgeons, nurses, technicians, and paramedics to handle any type of incident. One morning, a school shooting takes place and many children are injured. 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 for a manual request process by calling personnel one by one and seeing if they are available?
Or should they use an automated medical recall solution to send emergency recall-to-duty 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 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 medical 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 employee 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 the scratch.
SimplyCast anticipated the growing need for an automated hospital staff recall solution and built a ready-to-go medical recall system that can be customized for every single hospital.
All you need to do is to follow these basic steps to get your emergency staff recall solution ready:
Step 1: Custom Staff Contact Registry
A custom contact registry is basically a collection of all hospital staff information stored in a CRM. 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 custom staff contact registry is important because when you are sending recall messages to a specific group of staff, the system will use the information from this registry. SimplyCast has a built-in CRM that can be used as a custom staff contact registry.
Step 2: Templated Message & Responder Types
Once the staff registry is completed, users can plan for the types of emergency incidents that may occur (usually based on past records) and build recall messaging templates for each of those 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 case of an emergency, hospital administration staff does 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 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 responders prefer.
Step 4: Recall Confirmation
This is a two-way confirmation step. When a 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.
The best part is, when the recall campaign is successful and a team is assembled with 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. 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 emergency management 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 hospital staff 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 marketing automation tool 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 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 the 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 book a demo by clicking the button below and let us show you how our solution can help you manage your hospital emergency management system more efficiently.
