Belgian hospitals deploy alert system

A Belgium based network of hospitals has implemented a new notification workflow hub designed to automate the management of critical alerts and warnings.

The Belgium HIS-IZZ network of four hospitals has deployed the Enterprise Alert system from German IT provider Derdack, which allows detailed alerts to be sent to mobile phones.

Daniel Brocken, prevention advisor at HIS-IZZ hospitals said: “We had a basic paging system in place and could see that message master Enterprise Alert offered a proven solution that provided all of the notification functionality and the centralisation capabilities we were looking for.”

Before the new messaging system was implemented alerts were sent from the monitoring software to pagers carried by a team of technical staff. However, a 16 character message limit meant that a complex series of codes was used to indicate the nature and source of the alert.

The new system means that if a critical event is detected within any of the hospitals, such as a fire alarm being triggered, an email is immediately sent to the Enterprise Alert server.

Derdack’s software analyses the content of the email to determine the precise location of the alarm and nature of the problem and then sends an SMS message to the technical team that supports the particular building affected by the alert.

Brocken added: “It has given us greater control over notifications and reduced the risk of interruption to our business continuity. We have eliminated the need for staff to carry both pagers and mobile phones.

“Together with the low maintenance associated with message master Enterprise Alert, we have also reduced our ongoing monitoring costs.”

Staff at the hospitals are also looking to use the system for non-urgent warnings such as where a fire door has been left open or a smoke detector is no longer responding.

Matthes Derdack, managing director of Derdack said: “The strength of message master Enterprise Alert’s integration capabilities ensures that additional systems can be connected to the hub with minimal effort thus allowing the hospital to gain maximum benefit from its investment in notification workflow software.

“Centralisation and consolidation leads to significantly reduced total cost of ownership and ultimately, message master Enterprise Alert is an important element not only for business continuity but for the health and security of the hospital’s patients.”

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