Notifying all stakeholders during an emergency is quite a difficult job for hospital emergency communication teams; especially, when the response times need to be as quick as possible. Many hospitals use a manual system to blast emergency notifications to contacts. That sounds convenient, however, if you look deeper, you will find that there are many drawbacks to using a manual system.
For instance, if there is a Code Orange, you need to ensure that every contact who is being notified acknowledges the procedures. But if you just send a mass SMS notification blast, how do you even know whether all of them received the alert or not? Furthermore, how do you know that the appropriate action has been taken to rectify the emergency situation?
These are the loopholes that need to be addressed because emergencies do not send harbingers. They just happen, and the best we can do is to keep ourselves prepared.
That’s why many hospitals are gradually adopting automated mass medical alert solutions.
What does an automated medical notification system look like?
Well, you can get a brief overview of what an automated hospital emergency notification solution looks like and how it works in this blog. You can also find the benefits of using one such automated system in this blog.
However, when you are vetting a list of potential mass notification solutions for your hospital, you need to ensure that a set of requirements are met so you can have a smooth experience using the solution with the best output.
Here, for your convenience, we have put together our top seven features that should be incorporated into an ideal automated hospital emergency notification system.
Let’s check them out:
User-friendly Interface
Your solution should have a clean, intuitive user interface because during an emergency, your team members certainly will not want to navigate and find what to do and where to find a specific feature. Having a friendly interface not only helps your team get accustomed to the solution faster but ensures they are using it to the fullest.
Multi-channel Functionality
In many situations, you will want to maximize the probability of contacts getting notified. Imagine there is a fire alert and you are sending notifications to everyone in the area via phone call. One person is so busy working that they are ignoring all incoming phone calls and texts. Wait! This is not a rare situation. In fact, it is one of the most common scenarios you will find in a workplace. So, with the automated solution you should be able to send the same alerts via SMS, voice broadcast, and email so nobody is unaware of the situation.
Sending Personalized Notifications
When you send personalized messages, people tend to respond better. In many cases, you will need to send personalized alerts for different staff working for different hospital departments. For instance, during a Code White, you might want to send different directions for departments located in different buildings. So, your ideal solution should have the automated system to personalize each message on your behalf. Otherwise, sending these notifications will be time consuming and labor-intensive and there won’t be enough time during a critical event.
Real-time Tracking
When an emergency happens, you notify everyone and then what? In order to make sure that everyone is notified, you must track if they got your message or not. Using an automated system, you can not only alert thousands of contacts at once but you can also check who is getting your messages and who is yet to receive them. You can check metrics such as message delivery rate, opening rate etc. individually. These insights will help inform your further actions.
Two-way Communication
One of the most vital features an automated hospital notification should have is the ability to conduct two-way communication. Ideally, alerts are one-sided. However, in specific cases, you might need to allow contacts to respond to your message. For instance, the Code Orange alert we discussed earlier can include the option for recipients to acknowledge they have received the alert. You can let them respond by replying to SMS alerts, clicking on a button on an email alert, or pressing a button on their phone while the alert is broadcasted.
Hyper Scalability & Reliability
Let’s say your hospital only has 1,000 contacts to be alerted. So your manual solution’s capacity is not currently a concern. One day, an incident takes place that requires you to alert 10,000 people who work in and around the hospital. Your solution cannot cope up with this high volume of messaging! Scary, isn’t it? That’s why the solution you are choosing should be scalable.
Also, it should be reliable. If you cannot use the service right when you need it the most, the whole point of having an emergency hospital alert system is meaningless.
Secure Communication
Medical communication is one of the most sensitive areas of information handling. Every single piece of information has massive impact. If that information gets exposed, there can be severe consequences. Therefore, medical emergency communication teams should use a solution to alert people that uses secure means to store data and transmit messages. Personal information that people provide to the hospital should be encrypted and that data should be protected even in the rush of an emergency.
Is There a Solution That Meets All These Requirements?
There are many other features that you should consider. However, these are the primary features that your automated hospital notification solution should include.
Fortunately, SimplyCast meets all the requirements when it comes to these features.
Our platform is a no code/low code digital engagement platform with drag-and-drop functionality, so it is easy to use. Using our automated hospital alert solution, you can send notifications to your hospital stakeholders via multiple channels (SMS, email, and voice). We have nearly unlimited contact storage capacity and all our messaging is end-to-end encrypted. We also boast a minimum of 99.5% uptime.
You can not only send thousands of personalized messages using SimplyCast’s automated mass hospital notification solution but also track responses in real time. You can also download complete reports to extract insights to build more effective alert campaigns in the future.
Basically, you are getting an all-in-one emergency notification solution that is 100% ready to go. We can also customize the entire solution to fit your business requirements.
Sound interesting? Speak to our experts.
Request your customized, one-on-one demo with us by clicking the button below!
