| AAC Solutions Brochures (pdf) |
|---|
 DoD and Civilian Agencies |
| Healthcare |
More Patients. Better Service.
Enabling the Healthcare Mission: A Rapidly Growing Challenge
As baby boomers age, healthcare organizations can anticipate skyrocketing increases in their patient populations. They also need to prepare for overwhelming short-term spikes when disasters, disease, or terrorists strike. But healthcare organizations can’t simply increase staff to meet this demand. For one thing, it would be far too expensive, especially when organizations are making substantial investments in new beds and infrastructure. For another, the caregivers that organizations might desire to hire may not even exist. There’s already a critical shortage of nurses, and within the next five years a large percentage of doctors are expected to retire. So how can healthcare organizations care for far more patients with the same (or even fewer) people?
Applying the Right Solution
AAC helps healthcare organizations take the logical first step toward confronting a shortage of skilled caregivers. We engineer IP solutions that enable them to eliminate inefficiencies and maximize the productivity of the healthcare professionals they already have on staff. Here are just a few of the ways we put essential information where it is most needed—in the hands of the caregiver, at the side of the patient:
Maintaining Constant Contact
- Wireless IP phones ensure that essential personnel always receive their pages, wherever they are—without noisy PA announcements that distress patients.
- Facilities can transmit information with a page so that caregivers are fully prepared when called into a situation.
- Nurses can monitor emergency call buttons anywhere on the floor. Instead of covering the nursing station, they can spend more time helping patients.
- Housekeeping can be notified by IP phone when a patient departs and send an alert to admissions as soon as the room is ready.
- Police, fire, and EMS personnel can remain in communication throughout the facility. The wireless IP network eliminates any dead spots.
Locating Information and Resources
- Caregivers can locate equipment immediately using any phone or PC on the network. They can also monitor supplies and charge inventory as it is used.
- Doctors can make treatment decisions more rapidly by securely retrieving and examining x-rays over the network.
- Authorized caregivers can quickly access patient records. Access and use is governed and automatically documented according to privacy requirements.
Supporting Emergency Response
- Healthcare organizations, police, fire, and EMS can set up interoperable networks to ready a regional response to emergencies.
- During emergencies, IP network access can be extended to command centers, mobile hospitals, and first response units.
- A medical-grade network ensures caregivers have access to essential information during emergencies, even if part of the facility is destroyed.
Providing Better Service
- Patients can enter their phone number as they pull in to park at outpatient facilities. By the time they get inside, they are already checked in and the patient’s record has been pulled.
- When the phone rings at a doctor’s office or clinic, caller ID identifies the patient and provides their contact history to the staff member who answers.
All of these scenarios envision ways healthcare organizations can empower their people, allowing hospitals to do more with a reduced staff, and increasing their job satisfaction by enabling them to provide the best possible care.The good news for healthcare organizations is that capabilities like these are available now on an infrastructure that delivers 24x7 availability.
A Practical Approach
AAC provides healthcare organizations with a realistic strategy for supporting their people on a medical-grade IP infrastructure. We help them maximize the productivity of their people while protecting their budgets by implementing improvements as a series of building blocks— first within facilities and then between them. Project by project over time, we lay the foundation for operational effectiveness and emergency availability with our expertise in engineering IP networks. We build on that foundation with standards-based solutions for:
- Unified communications
- Enterprise infrastructure
We reinforce the foundation as needed with services for designing, building, operating, and managing networks:
- Data
- Voice
- Video
- Applications
- Information Assurance/Security
- Program Management
- Process Management
- Customer Support/Help Desk
- Operations and Management
We ensure the quality and timely delivery of all these capabilities with ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005, and ISO 9001:2008-certified best practices and technical certifications from Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Citrix, VMware, the Computing Technology Industry Association (CTIA), and other organizations.
Real World Knowledge Proven in Past Performance
AAC has over 25 years of experience serving healthcare organizations and government agencies. This past performance means we understand not just technology, but how our customers actually operate. Here are a few cases that illustrates how we combine our technical capabilities with real-world knowledge to help healthcare organizations build toward performance:
Fauquier Hospital
The Fauquier Hospital in Warrenton, VA has implemented a state-of-the-art Cisco VoIP system that allows users to use a single number that rings on both desktop and portable wireless phones. But when it deployed AAC’s PhoneTop® messaging solution to facilitate audio and text paging over the VoIP system, many users found that they missed pages because they couldn’t hear the ringers on the wireless phones in the hospital’s busy environment. To solve this problem, AAC’s XML/JAVA programmers requested that Cisco open up the application programming interface (API) to the ringer on the mobile phones. With this access, AAC was able to modify the signaling protocol within the PhoneTop application so that the wireless phones now vibrate as well as ring when paged. Sometimes a simple fix makes all the difference.
National Library of Medicine (NLM): Operations and Maintenance Support
Under three separate competitive awards since 1986, AAC designed, built, and continues to support NLM’s data communications network. Originally, AAC researched technologies, evaluated products, recommended an architecture, assisted in acquisition, then designed and implemented the infrastructure. Today, AAC provides ongoing support for the NLM LAN/WAN, remote access, systems administration, messaging systems, desktops, network monitoring, and management. AAC also helped NLM plan and set up a consolidated co-location facility.