Extension Healthcare Sets New Benchmark for Clinical Communications

Extension Healthcare has once again proven that the Extension Engage™ platform is the most comprehensive and scalable clinical communications and collaboration solution in healthcare. An enhancement to its fifth generation release, Engage Mobile 5.0 delivers unprecedented performance for care team and patient directories supporting as many as 100,000 entries while delivering sub-second roster searches.

Learn how Parkland Hospital is using @ExtensionHealth to support mobile communications for 15k users.

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In production at Parkland Memorial Hospital (TX), the IDN-scale Engage Mobile care team and patient directory (roster) currently supports more than 15,000 active caregivers. The hospital expects upwards of 20,000 caregivers to leverage Extension’s dynamic directory by end of year, a number that will likely continue to grow over time.

Parkland’s SVP and Chief Information Officer, Matt Kull, said, “Our caregivers use the Extension Engage application to augment workflows and ease communication with one another. With the IDN-scale roster integrated to our existing directory, nurses and physicians can easily find patients and appropriate and available clinical resources which improves response times to patient needs.”

In an environment as large as Parkland with 870 licensed beds and thousands of caregivers, maintaining a real-time dynamic listing of on-duty/off-duty/available/unavailable resources has previously been unattainable. No other vendor in today’s healthcare market can accommodate a synchronized roster of this magnitude.

The recent “Market Guide for Clinical Communication and Collaboration”, issued by Gartner, finds that in order ‘to counter unsustainable healthcare costs and mediocre outcomes, healthcare delivery organization (HDO) CIOs have begun to deploy clinical communications and collaboration (CC&C) systems to enable care teams to more closely and efficiently collaborate in the delivery of care.’ The recent enhancements to Engage Mobile 5.0 that enable caregivers to orchestrate more efficient patient treatment plans, further corroborates Gartner’s recognition of Extension Engage as a Clinical Communication and Collaboration solution in the new market guide.

Extension Healthcare

Extension Healthcare’s Engage™ “one platform” approach improves clinical communication, collaboration, care coordination, and workflow with a specific focus on reducing unnecessary clinical interruptions and improving response to critical patient events. With what is traditionally accomplished using several vendors and platforms, Extension combines comprehensive alarm management with secure communications on a single platform. The Extension platform intelligently notifies clinicians about real-time patient events through context-driven notifications to smartphones and other common mobile communication devices. Designed for enabling situational awareness and timely information sharing across care teams inside and outside the hospital, Engage aggregates alarm, patient, and care team data from a variety of systems including physiological monitors, nurse call and lab systems, Electronic Health Records (EHR), and location sensing technologies and sends relevant information to enhance the usefulness of alarm and alert notifications. Leveraging the common platform that is purpose built for extensive integration and data aggregation, the Engage Mobile secure texting solution helps to expedite care coordination in response to events. With proven integrations and interoperability in more than 200 hospitals, Extension Healthcare has become a leading solution for improving care quality and patient and caregiver experiences.

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