Ensuring Safety for Your Healthcare Community: Ask an Expert

By Stephanie Osorno, Marketing Copywriter at Alertus Technologies

Is your healthcare organization prepared to respond quickly in the event of an emergency? Are you able to reach everyone, everywhere, with time-sensitive notifications? 

A comprehensive mass notification solution is key to ensure the safety of patients, staff, and visitors in an essential healthcare environment. And with the many changes that the coronavirus (COVID-19) has brought to business operations, effective crisis communication — particularly for healthcare professionals — is more important than ever before. 

In this blog, we feature George Economas, Executive Director of Corporate Security at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He shares his organization’s past challenges with mass notification, including the steps they took to address those challenges and an important emergency preparedness lesson they learned along the way. 

Name: George Economas
Title: Executive Director- Corporate Security
Healthcare Organization: Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH)

What led you and your team at JHH to consider a mass notification solution like the Alertus System?

There was an active shooter incident at JHH in September of 2010. A patient’s son, who was the primary caregiver of his mother, was not happy with the outcome of a very difficult and high-risk surgery. While speaking with his mother’s doctor, the son pulled out a handgun and shot him. 

From that situation, we found that our emergency communication system was inadequate, to say the least. We did not hit the audience that we needed to hit — and our other audiences over at the university buildings were completely unaware of what was going on inside the hospital. The only thing they knew was what they were picking up from social media and the news media, which is not how we want to communicate with our staff.

What was your emergency notification process before Alertus?

We had been using the JHH emergency alerting system, which was a home-grown text messaging system that some folks from our school of engineering helped build. In order to get notifications for critical emergencies, people had to subscribe to the text message service. 

What key lessons did JHH learn about emergency alerting from that active shooter experience?

We learned that we could not communicate with everyone when we needed to in a timely manner. During critical events like these, the most crucial thing is communicating with staff members, students, visitors, etc. so that they have the ability to make an informed decision about their safety and what to do. 

We were unable to do that for the active shooter incident. We thought we had a good system in place, but it just wasn’t adequate enough. That was the biggest lesson we learned from that morning in 2010.

Can you give examples of how JHH applied that lesson to your emergency preparedness plan?

One of the first things that we did was look at how we can communicate through existing systems. We found that a lot of our older buildings on campus had outdated fire alarm systems and no overhead systems whatsoever. 

We ended up partnering with Alertus to install Alert Beacon® devices in many of those buildings for audible and visual notification capability. In addition, our IT department also collaborated with Alertus to implement the Alertus Desktop™ Notification on our desktop computers. IT uses it for network issues within the JHH system, but we also have access to that now for emergency notification. This way, we can access everyone’s computer for both emergency and non-emergency communication with just a few strokes on a keyboard. 

Besides implementing the Alertus System, were there any other steps JHH took to heighten awareness and improve communication in the event of an emergency?

After the incident, we determined that we needed mandatory staff training for handling violent or aggressive patients and family members. We made revisions to the Patient Visitor Handbook to address aggressive/threatening behavior, and we also revised the Visitors Guidelines Policy to address behavior and ramifications. In addition, we started compiling and monitoring behavior data by corporate security. 

Why do you think having a mass notification solution is so important for the healthcare community, especially in today's COVID-19 landscape?

Having a mass notification system and process in place is critical for every environment, public and private, where large numbers of people are present or gathered. Healthcare is obviously unique — especially in the inpatient facilities —  due to the fact that patient movement during an emergency situation can be limited, if not prohibitive. Therefore, quick and accurate mass notifications are critical to ensure everyone’s safety. Mass notifications provide staff and onsite first responders actionable information that will hopefully play out in such a manner that staff, patients, and visitors are quickly protected by engaging shelter in place strategies.

Want to learn more?

You can hear more from George in his presentation, Lessons Learned from Active Shooter Incident at Johns Hopkins Hospital, earlier this year.

And for additional insight on implementing innovative alerting tools in a healthcare environment, be sure to catch our on-demand webinar: Enhancing Safety in a COVID-19 Landscape: Communication Tools for Healthcare Professionals.