Electronic Health Reporter

AtHoc, Inc., the leader in network-centric interactive crisis communication systems, today announced that Baylor Scott & White Health (BSWH), the largest not-for-profit healthcare system in Texas, has expanded its use of the AtHoc Critical Communications platform for IT outages, emergency preparedness and clinical alerts across the enterprise and has categorized it as a critical system within their IT infrastructure. AtHoc is deemed a critical communication tool to sustain the vital mission of the health system in providing safe and effective care to its patients.

Baylor Health Care System originally purchased AtHoc’s platform for IT alerting three years ago to notify their clinical IT systems users of scheduled planned downtime events or unplanned systems interruptions via desktop pop-ups. Scott & White Health also used AtHoc for emergency preparedness situations for codes for severe weather, manmade or natural disasters and security-related emergencies within their widely dispersed hospital system. Now that the two organizations have combined to create BSWH, comprising 43 hospitals and numerous ambulatory health centers across central and northern Texas, AtHoc’s solution will be rolled out using the best practices from the two systems.

“We are rolling out AtHoc’s mobile application on a limited basis to the IT infrastructure team in the North Texas division of BSWH for use during IT outage situations,” said Leslie Leblanc, BSWH’s vice president of Electronic Health Records (EHR). “If a system goes down at 2 a.m., I can pick up my smartphone and alert my entire team and relevant executives with the push of a button. Within two minutes, we can have 50 critical team members on a bridge line responding to whatever incident is occurring.”

As a result of successful implementations during both IT-outage and emergency-preparedness situations, BSWH’s clinical personnel have also adopted the AtHoc platform. Its ability to send instantaneous, reliable, multi-modal alerts prompted clinical teams to use the alerting technology for cardiac arrest and ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction (STEMI) notifications. Additional critical response teams utilize the platform to alert of and respond to urgent and emergent clinical situations throughout the growing healthcare organization’s various campuses and settings.

“Each phase of our AtHoc system implementation has involved a larger scope of use cases, and we continue to find more operations critical uses for it,” said Lee Lavergne, manager, EHR & Clinical Systems, BSWH. “We have consistently pushed the envelope of the AtHoc technology and appreciate their responsiveness in projecting our evolving needs in their product development roadmap.”

“We provide our customers, in healthcare especially, with a critical communications system that can be used every day, within a variety of areas, so that it is already second nature to their personnel when a crisis situation occurs,” said John Tempesco, senior director of healthcare at AtHoc. “We are honored to have a prestigious healthcare system such as Baylor Scott & White as one of our visionary customers keeping us on the cutting edge of innovation.”

AtHoc’s advanced solutions also bring enterprise-class, end-to-end communication to major healthcare organizations such as Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Care At Home, Kaiser Permanente, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Raymond W. Bliss Army Medical Center, Wilford Hall Medical Center and Irwin Army Hospital, Ft. Riley.

AtHoc is demonstrating the Critical Communications platform at the HIMSS 2014 Annual Conference & Exhibition in Orlando, Fla., Feb. 23-27, 2014 at Booth #1413.

About AtHoc
AtHoc is the recognized leader, innovator and trusted partner in network-centric interactive crisis communication systems. AtHoc’s products are used for physical security, employee protection, personnel accountability, staff recall and regulatory compliance for military, homeland security, government, healthcare, industrial and commercial organizations.

Millions of end-users worldwide rely on AtHoc’s unified notification systems for their emergency alerting and critical communication needs in organizations such as Microsoft, Eastman Chemical, USS-POSCO Industries, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Baylor Scott & White Health, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (WRNMMC), UCLA, U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

AtHoc was recently awarded Government Security News’ (GSN) 2012 Homeland Security Award for Best Mass Notification System and has also been recognized by Gartner, Inc. as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Emergency Mass Notification Services and by IHS Inc. as The Fastest Growing Mass Notification Software Supplier. For more information about AtHoc, please visit www.athoc.com.