Advanced nurse-patient communication system.

Effective communication is the most important part of any healthcare organization. For many years, hospital nurse call solutions had been stand-alone systems with occasional integration to pocket paging for outputting patient call alerts to mobile staff. In the late 1990's, technology enabled in-building wireless phones to supplement or replace paging systems as a means of not only sending alerts, but also enabling voice communication between mobile staff and patients. Today's nurse call market requires integration of additional information from location and ADT (admit, discharge, transfer) systems into what have traditionally been nurse call applications. This system information is required not only at the nursing station, pagers, and phones, but also at PC's placed on each patient care floor in hallways, nurse stations, and offices, and at areas away from the patients, including administrator and clinical engineering offices. It is crucial that nurses have the latest patient information in their hand wherever they go in the hospital. In this paper, MatchMaker.NET has been developed to integrate all these technologies into the hospital's LAN to improve nurse-patient communication.