An extension to existing nurse call systems: Event manager server

Abstract

For many years, hospital nurse call solutions had been stand-alone systems with occasional integration to pocket paging for outputting patient call alerts to mobile staff. During the early 1990's, the demand for nurse call activity reporting increased, as PCs became common place and customers began using them to support risk management and quality improvement processes. In the late 1990's, technology enabled in-building wireless phones to supplement or replace paging systems as a means of not only sending alerts, but also enabling voice communication between mobile staff and patients. Today's nurse call market requires integration of additional information from location and ADT (admit, discharge, transfer) systems into what have traditionally been nurse call applications. This system information is required not only at the nursing station, pagers, and phones, but also at PCs placed on each patient care floor in hallways, nurse stations, and offices, and at areas away from the patients, including administrator and clinical engineering offices. In this paper, event manager server (EMSrv) has been developed to facilitate this communication with the nurse call system.