Optimally Prepared for Any Emergency

Assemble emergency teams — e.g. in a cardiac alarm

Emergencies are part of the every-day routine in any hospital or clinic. Time and again sensitive in-hospital situations occur, also outside the typical critical areas such as intensive care units, cardiology and operating theaters, and every single one of these moments requires immediate professional medical care. To respond to all of these emergencies in the best possible way, hospitals form medical emergency teams or METs. These teams bring together physicians and nursing professionals from different specialist departments for immediate and professional response whenever a human life is in danger on the clinic grounds.

Naturally, every clinic management is well aware of the high hopes and expectations from patients and relatives alike when it comes to the safety and the emergency medical care in their hospital. In fact, the professional medical emergency care is considered a most essential quality factor. It is therefore all the more vital to be optimally prepared for all eventualities. To reach this objective, emergency workflows are defined and emergency cases as well as defibrillators are positioned in strategic locations. Also, members of emergency and reanimation teams are specially trained and regular exercises are carried out with the remaining hospital staff to ensure that everyone is thoroughly skilled in all necessary measures, processes and alerting structures.

Save valuable time in an emergency

And yet, in emergency situations valuable time is frequently lost between the moment the emergency call is set off and the MET's arrival or the initiation of the first measures - time that can make all the difference for the patient's health and life. The paramount strategy to significantly improve the chances of success of a hospital's rescue measures is therefore to reduce this time span to as short as possible.

Our Solution

As soon as a patient in serious condition is detected in-hospital, the person who finds the patient immediately dials the emergency number that is established for this very purpose. When we look at this crucial moment, valuable time is still wasted and lost far too often because communications processes still have to be carried out by hand and are not yet processed automatically. In many of these cases, switchboard or traditional telephone exchange staff are still used as an intermediary, and they need to describe the emergency before the information is finally forwarded to the right MET via loudspeaker announcement or as text message.

In contrast to this time-consuming procedure, all emergency calls that reach DAKS autonomously launch predefined and fully automated communications processes. For example, the alarm signal is sent directly to the mobile devices of a resuscitation team whose members are all interconnected instantly so that they can talk to one another and to the emergency caller, in a veritable emergency conference.

This instantaneous voice contact is a crucial and decisive advantage

It enables the professionals involved to coordinate in detail the necessary procedures right after the alarm is received, but also to identify the responders who are already closest to the patient and to support and instruct the person who found the patient so that he/she can administer the best first aid measures until the MET arrives. In addition, the instantaneous voice contact makes it possible to clarify already in this crucial phase the relevant patient information that can be decisive for the overall success (e.g. what are the patient's exact symptoms? any special risk factors?).

Also, whenever an emergency call is made the caller's phone number is presented as text message on the display of all alerted responders. This enables every alerted person to always know - should the connection be lost - who it is that is calling for emergency help. And finally, a positioning system can be used to pinpoint the emergency caller's approximate location and to add this valuable information to the emergency call details that are sent to the alerted responders.

If DAKS is unable to reach individual members of a medical emergency team or if MET members are unable to react, e. g. because they are already taking care of another emergency, the system immediately and automatically forwards the emergency call to their predefined proxy. It is little surprise that this process accelerates the dispatch of full METs considerably and in every emergency situation.

For full traceability, DAKS logs the entire emergency call process in greatest detail. This regularly proves of particular importance when professional rescue measures fail despite all the efforts that are made.

Your Benefits

Statistics show that roughly 25 percent of all in-hospital emergency calls require an immediate resuscitation. For example, in a cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation the defibrillation must to be administered within three minutes to avoid damage to further organs, and here especially irreversible brain damage. Quick action is the paramount priority. When we look at these facts and figures, it becomes all the more obvious why a technically reliable and automated alarm and alerting process such as DAKS provides the instrumental impact that is needed to increase the chances of success of any in-hospital rescue measure:

• Medical emergency teams are better informed, arrive faster where they are needed most and are able to provide better help and administer the right professional treatment.
• The person who sets off the emergency call gets clear and professional instructions over the phone and is enabled to actively and effectively participate in the immediate first aid measures. Providing this direct over-the-phone voice support and assuring the emergency caller that the MET will arrive at the scene within the shortest time possible gives the confidence that is needed to take the right action when every moment counts.
• The fact that DAKS fully logs all incoming emergency calls guarantees comprehensive evaluability. With DAKS, you can produce full and verifiable evidence with regard to the system's alerting structure, whenever you need it. Therefore DAKS is the basis for higher quality in medical emergency care.
• DAKS makes doctors, physicians and hospital staff feel safer. 
• DAKS helps to build increased trust in your hospital.