Hospitals, among all healthcare institutions, tend to have some of the most demanding emergencies. Chief among those emergencies is a hospital evacuation – a nightmare scenario that most hospitals try to avoid wherever possible. In most hospitals in Canada, this is called a code green. During a code green, manual processes take up a lot of time that could be better spent on patients, staff, and family members during such a stressful event. 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 the most efficient solutions to enhance their code green response systems.
Code green automation is one of these groundbreaking solutions.
Automation deals with one of the most critical situations hospitals can face: slow response in the face of an evacuation. Hospitals always make sure that backups are available if any situation escalates. These backups and contingencies, unfortunately, often don’t account for things like the contacting of next of kin during an emergency evacuation. When patients must be discharged, often it is up to a group of nurses to begin calling and arranging pickups, on top of keeping calm during and after the evacuation.
With an automated code green solution, hospital emergency administrations can send automated messages to staff alerting them of the evacuation. They can also track live responses from other hospitals accounting for the resources necessary to accommodate critical care patients, and track input from staff on the ground. In this way, emergency managers can assemble teams or resources in the shortest amount of time possible, while also making sure that resource mobilization is highly optimized.
Let’s check out an example.
An incident at a hospital has necessitated a full evacuation. Alerting all the patients, visitors, and staff at once could cause a panic and cause the day to end in tragedy. Instead, once the administration has been made aware of the issue, they can send a discreet message to staff, who can then take charge of the situation from the beginning. While this is happening, administrative staff can check with other hospitals to acquire vital resources.
Live surveys and response tracking allow the administrative team to keep track of resources at other hospitals at the exact same time as they receive responses from staff members on the floor and confirm the evacuation of various areas of the hospital. This can all be done while being prepared to launch other alerts or activate backup plans.
How to Set Up a Hospital Evacuation Solution
The most critical steps of setting up an automated, digital code green solution are developing a code green strategy, figuring out the set of tasks needed to build the evacuation process, and finally, finding the right digital tools to build the perfect code green process. Fortunately, hospitals do not have to build this solution from nothing.
SimplyCast anticipated the growing need for an automated evacuation solution and built a ready-to-go code green evacuation system that can be customized for every single hospital.
Follow these basic steps to get your code green solution ready.
Step 1: Build Crisis Alerts
You have planned extensively and it’s time to build out the steps of your code green response. By templating the alert messages and other content to be sent out, you ensure consistency and accuracy of messaging well in advance of the emergency. This eliminates the possibility of mistakes in messaging due to the chaos of the situation at hand. By building crisis alerts ahead of time, you ensure that when they need to be sent, key messages can be triggered with the click of a single button. This might not seem like much, but it allows precious seconds or even minutes to be saved for each task that can be templated out.
Step 2: Live Survey
Once the alerts are built, you want to take stock of what you need from other medical institutions in an evacuation situation and build live surveys. These can be sent instantly when a code green is triggered, 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, as you will be able to verify that the processes you’ve built will function during an emergency. For a test or a real deployment of the solution, the process will be the same. A single click to trigger each message and a central dashboard where you can track responses in real time.
Step 4: Review Process
After a code green activation, you can review reports to see if there were any issues and address them to improve the solution’s effectiveness, continually tweaking to accommodate new types of emergencies or implementing contingencies to ensure there’s always a backup. This will help make the solution the best it can be for your hospital.
Why SimplyCast?
With this, you have a complete, digital engagement-powered code green 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 code green 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 percent minimum uptime. With our emergency evacuation solution, you can have peace of mind.
Interested in implementing an automated code green solution?
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 green system more efficiently.
