Ascom Americas Powers Clinical Efficiencies & Quality of Care

Most clinicians in acute care feel the challenge of digital information gaps every shift. That’s because clinical communication and collaboration often remain siloed, which can impact how nurses provide care, and ultimately it shows up in patient outcomes. Recently, we interviewed Ascom Americas’ leaders to understand how they’re helping hospitals optimize clinical workflows. Ascom’s unique capability is gathering multiple inputs across connected medical devices, consolidating the information, filtering it intelligently, and sending actionable information at the right time to augment care delivery and quality.

Helping Hospitals Get Measurable ROI from Technology

Ascom’s expertise focuses on improving workflows in acute care hospitals and long-term care facilities. The company’s products are used in more than 46% of teaching hospitals in the U.S., and Ascom systems handle more than 800 million alerts every day. The Ascom Healthcare Platform (AHP) encompasses four key areas – nurse call, mobile devices, software and professional services. When customers standardize on the AHP portfolio, they realize the compounded benefits of Ascom’s comprehensive solutions, which are configured to their unique needs; however, being vendor neutral, the AHP also offers the flexibility for customers to integrate Ascom with other vendors’ solutions. Ascom’s solutions enable customers to implement important capabilities, from clinical surveillance with medical device integration (MDI) and clinical decision support, to remote patient monitoring of medical devices, and smart alarming and alerting.

David Gutillo, Director of Field Marketing Innovation in Healthcare at Ascom Americas, believes Ascom and its products are poised to become the enabling platform to which medical devices and systems in a hospital connects, and this will help shift the model to proactive, predictive care.

“We’ve designed our solutions and services to be highly configurable while also supporting standards and best practices to help hospitals meet their goals, whether it be increasing quality of care, reducing nursing turnover, improving patient outcomes or otherwise.”

We bring data to life. Every single second, Ascom systems generate 1.3 million data points, so making sense of all that information is extremely important for clinicians.

Powering Clinical Insights with Ascom Clinicians

The Ascom Healthcare Platform provides the clinical communication and workflow orchestration tools needed to meet a variety of challenges. Our team of veteran clinicians working directly with hospital staff in designing and optimizing workflows, makes a difference in deploying effective solutions that are truly force multipliers. Ascom Americas’ Clinical Application Specialist Kenneth Catoe states that the clinical data analytics team helps hospitals better understand the information their technology is generating by analyzing it and consulting with customers to improve care quality. Because hospitals are dynamic environments this service helps them manage the changes with actionable and goal-oriented insights.

“We bring data to life. Every single second, Ascom systems generate 1.3 million data points, so making sense of all that information is extremely important for clinicians”, Catoe shares. He goes on to add, “When we’re consulting on workflow design, we’re trying to look at the entire picture, from the data our systems are generating and taking other data into account too. Then we combine data analysis with what we’ve seen and learned onsite along with our clinical expertise to provide recommendations for improvements.”

Fellow Ascom Americas clinician Huyen Cam notes that, “This process of identifying areas for continued improvements helps hospitals meet their KPIs, whether it’s being more efficient with nurses working at their top of license to discharging patients faster and increasing throughput.”  

Empowering Customers with Solutions That Make a Difference

Ascom solutions are making a difference for customers. For example, RiverSpring Living, a senior living facility in New York, is using the complete AHP, beginning with implementing the Ascom nurse call system. Staff use an Ascom Myco smartphone to receive alerts from Ascom’s Unite software, so as soon as a resident presses the nurse call button, staff can respond immediately. During the first year of operation, RiverSpring Living processed more than 90,000 alerts and answered 95 percent of calls in less than two minutes. This ROI is making a difference in both resident and nurse satisfaction. 

In another example, Ascom’s Unite software solution helped a Southern California Hospital experience a 32% reduction in alarm notification messages sent to caregivers through basic filtering rules. By using a 10-second alarm filtering delay, the hospital saw a 38% reduction in alarm notification. This improvement resulted in smoother, more efficient workflows and made alarms more actionable and relevant.

A Complete Provider for Clinical Workflow Solutions

Ascom offers a full range of services through its network of more than 150 partners and 2,000 technicians to help hospitals realize the benefits of Ascom solutions. Technical services include plans for hardware repair, software upgrades and technical support as well as remote monitoring of a customer’s IT infrastructure connected to the AHP.

Delivering Continuous Innovation and Sustainability

A five-point strategic plan guides Ascom Americas and its regional leadership team, consisting of Kelly Feist, Managing Director; Corrado Grieci, Vice President of Sales; Tom McKearney, SVP Business Development and Marketing; Michael Augusti, Head of Market Innovation; Nancy Duffy, Finance Head; Robert Wittwer, SVP Professional Services and Chris LaFratta, SVP, Customer Success. For the near term, Ascom is delivering against four strategic pillars to accelerate growth and performance. Continuous innovation underpins this focus to further embed Ascom as a critical infrastructure at the center of delivery of care in the acute care environment. Over the longer term, many of Ascom’s solutions will continue evolving to become a cloud-native platform while enhancing MDI, alarm management, clinical collaboration, and augmented intelligence capabilities. Smart Nurse Call will evolve with enhanced software and hardware capabilities, and better designs will streamline installing and configuring them. With the Ascom Healthcare Platform, the future for clinical workflow technologies that help hospitals solve some of their biggest challenges looks bright and laden with opportunity.