Guest Column: Are Nurse Call Systems Dead?

By Andrew Rothan, CEO, Next Intelligence Health, Inc. (NIQ)

CEO, Andrew Rothon, looks at the unprecedented fundamental challenge faced by the Healthcare Industry. That is; how to cope with ever-increasing patient numbers in the face of rising operational costs and tight budgets? It's a challenge that will continue for the rest of this decade.

The demand for healthcare services is dramatically increasing — due mainly to a growth in the senior population and the number of chronically ill patients requiring continued care. Yet there is a significant reduction in government tax collections and citizens with private health care to afford a medical health system where cost are approaching 15% of GDP (gross domestic product) and continue to grow at 5%. The global financial crisis has exposed the health care industries rapidly increasing costs as unaffordable for a majority of OECD countries and developing counties.

To overcome the financial crisis and reduced government budgets, hospitals need to increase both efficiency and productivity to optimize the balance of costs to the provider and benefits to the patient. To add to that complexity, many governments are changing policy and regulatory framework of the healthcare industry, leading to a growth in consumer-driven healthcare where patients are viewed as customers.

As a result, healthcare organizations need to improve their service to appease patient satisfaction, improve patient safety, and improve quality of care. They need to improve efficiency of medical device interconnectivity, enabling access to the right information at the right time. They need to reduce waiting and treatment times. And they need a better method of caring for patients after they leave the hospital. Furthermore, there are pressing internal issues such as ensuring staff satisfaction, retention, and increasing productivity levels.

The medical devices industry, network IT device mobility industry, and the nurse call / life safety systems industries are currently experiencing significant technology convergence. This technology convergence is accelerating to meet demand for workflow productivity, QA, reporting, efficiency, and patient safety. However, legacy nurse call systems, and some current technology nurse call systems, provide nothing more than a basic life safety system. These system technologies are analogous to Florence Nightingale's 1860 system of telling a patient to ‘ring the bell if you need me.' That's 150 years with no real improvement in patient safety delivered by life safety systems.