Hospitals are moving away from overhead paging for Code and Stat alerts, evolving into a ‘Quiet Hospital’. The reasons are both to minimize patient disruption but also to adhere to stricter privacy expectations. To accomplish this, hospitals will tend to utilize wide area paging and legacy in-house paging systems, each with their own merits.
Wide area paging is proven, reliable, and delivers excellent coverage – inside and out of the facilities. However, the delivery time for the message is typically in the 25 to 45 seconds range (PageNet delivery times, some carriers may experience longer delays). While this is considered adequate or even excellent for most applications, it does not satisfy the absolute requirement of fast pages for a ‘pager-first’ code alert strategy.
Legacy in-house systems are typically very fast for message delivery due to the fact that they carry a light load. This performance comes at a price; they are less capital efficient and are costly to operate. Further, they tend to suffer from increasing costs due to reduced production volumes in the UHF and VHF bands that they typically occupy. Cost of pagers in these bands will typically be 2-3x for a comparable 900 MHz device. The network equipment necessary to operate the system (transmitters, filters, encoders, etc.) share similar cost disadvantages and as most hospitals with this type of system have come to realize, there are quite significant hidden costs. The cost of maintaining a stand-alone paging network, coordinating and satisfying Industry Canada licensing requirements, managing a pager fleet, and coordination of device repairs all add up to significant personnel/resource costs when aggregated.
Hospital management have a dilemma – to meet the non-compromising need for a robust and fast system while also meeting the challenging capital and operating expense restrictions common in Healthcare today.
To address this, PageNet has created the Response! Network, the first Carrier-Grade solution designed specifically for Code and Stat paging. The system is designed and proven to deliver the messaging performance required within the fiscal realities of our modern healthcare environment.
How does PageNet accomplish this? The traffic is driven on a dedicated space segment satellite channel to dedicated campus transmitters. Broadcast messages are delivered on a separate and dedicated 900 MHz frequency using the near real-time streaming POCSAG protocol. This system has been deployed in over 30 hospitals in Canada and consistently delivers Code messages in less than 10 seconds (service performance standard is under 10 seconds 95% of the time). By design, loading on this network is restricted to hospitals, law enforcement, and public safety. Loading levels will be limited to ensure throughput latency is maintained.
Contact us to learn more today.