Wavelink announces Olinqua's hospital communication solution

Enterprise solutions provider Wavelink has announced the availability of Olinqua’s mobile communication application for hospitals.

Although most hospitals still rely on pagers to communicate with staff, paging technology is ageing, with many systems needing to be upgraded or replaced. Paging is also one-way, with no ability to provide feedback or acknowledge receipt of messages. Without knowing if a message has been read, or even received, it is not possible to escalate messages. The solution is to mass-broadcast messages to a wide audience to increase the chance of a response.

In addition, paging does not facilitate person-to-person communication, which means that many staff members are exchanging information via personal devices using unapproved, potentially unsecured consumer messaging tools such as WhatsApp. This leaves hospitals vulnerable, with no control or access to the communication exchange.

Furthermore, messages received on pagers are not categorised, so the user can’t filter by message type or see multiple messages on a screen; they have to scroll through single lines of text to find a message. This means that a message for a code alarm could be buried amongst other, less important, messages and requests, potentially putting patient lives at risk.

In today’s digital environment, hospitals need a better way to communicate with staff and ensure the highest standard in security and patient care. To address this, Olinqua has released its mobile communications application.

Designed specifically for hospital users including doctors, nurses, ward clerks, clinical assistants and facilities and security teams, the mobile app provides a number of features, including:

• two-way, secure messaging that ensures only approved contacts receive messages
• message by role, name or team (ad hoc or pre-defined)
• task management, including the ability to create, assign, accept and complete tasks
• customised task types, with different responders for each, ensuring skill sets are matched to required tasks
• incident management, including the ability to create, assign, respond to or complete hospital codes
• colour-coding capability to match hospitals’ alert code structure, for example fire/smoke (code red); medical emergency (code blue); personal threat (code black)
• full visibility into code participation.
• the ability to converse within a code/incident and have the conversation logged against the code for future audit
• user credentials enabling each user to sign in and out of the app from a smart device
• instant revoking of user rights to access messages and other information.
   

Wavelink Health Practice Lead Alan Stocker said, “With hospitals starting to adopt purpose-built smart devices, as well as providing for bring-your-own-devices, there is a real opportunity for hospitals to replace pagers with an application that is multifaceted, providing person-to-person and role-to-role communication functionality with a familiar format that staff are used to seeing in their everyday lives, such as on social messaging applications.”

Olinqua Director Martin Moszczynski added, “The Olinqua mobile communication application will offer healthcare workers an improved communications experience, along with increased efficiency and much richer information on events occurring within the hospital to improve patient outcomes.”

The Olinqua mobile communication application will be available in Australia and New Zealand in December 2020.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Minerva Studio