With PerfectServe, St. Rita’s Medical Center is now measuring critical patient care communications performance.

• A lack of any centralized contact resource left nurses trying to track physicians’ whereabouts on their own, using multiple answering services, office back-lines and physicians’ pagers and cell and home phones.
• Contact failures were commonplace, frustrating both nurses and physicians and hindering the hospital’s efforts to establish rapid response teams.
• Paging network coverage was deteriorating appreciably.
• American College of Surgeons standards required confirmation and documentation of every trauma alert notification; existing manual processes did not comply.

Solution

• The previous patchwork of physician contact methods was replaced by a single phone number used by nurses to contact every medical staff member.
• Call paths were established for critical patient care functions, e.g., rapid response teams, trauma alerts, EKG notifications, and others.
• Because each physician’s call schedule is maintained in real-time, nurses calling through PerfectServe are able to reach the correct physician on-call or covering doctor.

Results

• PerfectServe determined that more than 14,000 physician calls per month — 168,000 per year — are placed by hospital staff.
• Achieved full deployment of PerfectServe One-2-One in 90 days.
• Enabled the fastest possible rapid response team notification process by automating contact between caller and recipients.
• Each and every rapid response team call is routinely documented. Weekly reports enhance the mandatory quality assurance review process.
• Trauma alerts follow a standardized, measurable, failsafe notification process that complies with American College of Surgeons standards.
• PerfectServe’s standardized process allows clinical leaders to determine:
• How many calls are made to physicians.
• When those calls occur and from which departments they originate.
• Which physicians are contacted and how often.
In many cases, the hospital can even ascertain:
• Whether or not a desired physician was on call, and if not, who was covering.
• How the system attempted to contact a physician and whether or not the call was completed in real time or resulted in a message.
• The message type, the notification attempts that were made, the precise time a voice message was retrieved, and when the physician replied.