Extension Healthcare
Enterprise Clinical Communication and Collaboration Solutions

A next generation alarm management platform is deployed by hospitals to improve patient safety risks by reducing clinical interruption fatigue for nurses and facilitating communication and collaboration between patients and staff. Patient events generated by clinical systems and medical devices require a centralized platform to intelligently integrate all of them, and to provide a means to communicate with the care team about the patient. A lack of interoperability results in these disparate systems – patient monitors, nurse call systems, EHRs - competing for a nurse’s attention, and limits the ability of staff members to easily collaborate on a patient’s care.

Fort Wayne, IN based Extension Healthcare, one of the leading providers of next generation alarm management, designs its solutions with an aim to meet the clinical communication needs most cited by staff and patients. The company’s Extension Engage™ platform consists of a clinical workflow engine and the Engage Mobile™ application that helps to deliver comprehensive hospital alarm management, event driven patient-centric text messaging, and care team collaboration solutions. “We provide a middleware platform that delivers clinical alarms and other time-sensitive, event-based notifications to the most suitable, available clinician,” said Steve Tyler, CTO at Extension Healthcare.

The enterprise alarm safety and event response solution delivers actionable alarms and alerts with patient context to staff recipients using mobile phones, and facilitates communication between members of the care team as well as patients. According to Tyler, “The presence of the alarm context in the Engage Platform ensures easy identification of the patients and streamlines the care coordination process.”

Alarms, alerts, and communications can be delivered inside, or outside the hospital as long as the recipient is available to receive them, and responded to via text or voice call.

The server-based, clinical workflow platform has a user-friendly interface to direct attention of the caregivers toward patients’ health. “Engage accomplishes this by offering complete scalability with the help of a single appliance-based server, which can be placed on-premise or accessed virtually,” explained Tyler.

The presence of the alarm context in the Engage™ Platform ensures easy identification of the patients and streamlines the care coordination process

Extension Engage is currently being leveraged by HCA Healthcare, Inc., a leading provider in healthcare services, to mitigate the pain points associated with clinical communication and collaboration. The client was facing hurdles managing patient response times and team coordination along with accessing stored data in the EHR due to fallibility of traditional alarm solutions. Engage helped HCA improve response times to patient needs by facilitating better communication between patients and staff. HCA enhanced workflow efficiency and improved the quality of care for patients with Engage.

Engage is the only platform that supports Voice over IP (VoIP) Wi- Fi handsets, and Smartphones all in single device. Extension Healthcare’s future focus is evolving and employing new processes of responding to patients. The company looks forward to including metric benchmarks for hospitals to continually assess solution improvements. “Our company will utilize situational awareness, which will have a dramatic impact on patient experience and events,” concludes Tyler.