NHS Lanarkshire upgrades Multitone Electronics critical messaging system

NHS Lanarkshire has upgraded the critical messaging system supplied by Multitone Electronics at The University Hospital Hairmyres in East Kilbride, a hospital it manages.

The organisation has built on its long-term partnership with Multitone Electronics, a critical communications specialist that originally supplied the system in 2001.

Multitone initially installed the system when the hospital first opened, subsequently upgrading it to the new i-Message software platform in 2015, when the hospital needed to undertake further work to integrate unsupported servers into the critical communications framework and turned to Multitone for an enhanced solution.

The new tailored solution comprises delivery of a new version of the software and hardware, ensuring that the hospital has an even more robust system and is supported by Microsoft with self-healing Network Database (NDB) Clustering.

The technology safeguards the hospital in several ways, with the clustering approach including 360-degree monitoring and anomaly detection, alerting system managers to potential issues. The self-healing capability will further result in the seamless achievement of 99.9% availability.

John Melville, major account manager at Multitone, said: “Multitone Electronics has been working with the NHS Lanarkshire University Hospital Hairmyres as partners in critical wireless messaging for over 20 years.

“We are delighted with the renewed confidence shown by the authority in continuing to work with us to improve the hospital’s critical communications, using smart technology to provide safe, high-quality, and patient-centred care.”

Multitone itself has a history working in the NHS dating back to the 1950s, when it pioneered with pagers throughout the health service. In recent years the company has been at the forefront of new technology solutions such as i-Message, available as a cloud service, on-premises or as a hybrid of both systems.

The critical messaging system is not the only system to be deployed across Lanarkshire. Back in 2020 it was announced that Patientrack, an early warning system that helps identify when patients are at risk of deterioration, was to be rolled out across the entirety of NHS Lanarkshire.