What You Should Know:
– TigerConnect has announced an expansion in their suite through the acquisition of Critical Alert, a leading provider of enterprise-grade middleware for hospitals and health systems.
– For the hundreds of thousands of nurses that currently use TigerConnect, these new capabilities will deliver real-time, contextual information to their mobile device or desktop to allow them to work smarter, prioritize responses, and efficiently coordinate care, all within the same reliable TigerConnect platform they use every day for enterprise messaging.
TigerConnect®, a care team collaboration solution, today announced the acquisition of Critical Alert, a Jacksonville, FL-based leading provider of enterprise-grade middleware for hospitals and health systems. Critical Alert’s product suite consists of a middleware suite of products as well as traditional nurse call hardware servicing over 200 hospitals in North America. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Real-Time Care Team Collaboration for Hospitals
Founded in 1983, Cloud-native and mobile-first, Critical Alert’s middleware solution enables any health system to combine nurse call, alarm and event management, medical device interoperability, and clinical workflow analytics. TigerConnect will integrate Critical Alert’s middleware stack into its platform to power a wide range of alert types and alarm management enhancements for TigerConnect’s customers. Critical Alert’s Nurse Call hardware business will continue to operate under its namesake as a standalone business unit.
When combined with Critical Alert’s middleware, TigerConnect dramatically enhances the value proposition to nursing, IT leadership, and end-users. This ‘dream suite’ of capabilities comes at a time when nurse burnout is at a record high and chronic nurse shortages are severely challenging organizations’ ability to deliver the best quality care.
“We see the Critical Alert acquisition as highly strategic and a natural evolution of our already-robust collaboration platform,” said Brad Brooks, CEO and co-founder of TigerConnect. “For the hundreds of thousands of nurses that currently use TigerConnect, these new capabilities will deliver real-time, contextual information to their mobile device or desktop to allow them to work smarter, prioritize responses, and efficiently coordinate care, all within the same reliable TigerConnect platform they use every day for enterprise messaging.”
Post-Acquisition Plans
Joining TigerConnect is Critical Alert CEO John Elms, who will assume the role as TigerConnect Chief Product Officer, guiding the integration of the two companies’ technologies and leading the development of all future product offerings. Wil Lukens, currently VP of Sales for Critical Alert, will assume the role of General Manager of Critical Alert’s traditional Nurse Call hardware unit.
“The timing of the deal and the fit of these two companies aligned perfectly,” said John Elms, CEO of Critical Alert. “Two best-in-class, highly complementary solutions coming together to solve some of the chronic challenges—alarm fatigue, response prioritization, resource optimization—that have driven nurse teams to the brink. Together, these unified technologies will make care professionals’ lives easier, not harder, and I couldn’t be more excited to lead the TigerConnect product organization into this next chapter.”
Critical Alert Integration with TigerConnect Plans
TigerConnect’s robust product suite, which includes care team collaboration (TigerFlow®), on-call scheduling (TigerSchedule®), virtual care/telemedicine (TigerTouch®), and now virtualized nurse call and alerts/alarm management (Critical Alert middleware), will help transform hospitals and healthcare organizations into the real-time health systems of the future.
Hardware-free Middleware Forms the Foundation
With a shared cloud-native approach, Critical Alert’s advanced middleware seamlessly fuses TigerConnect’s care team collaboration with alarm management and event notifications. Deep enterprise-level integrations with hospital systems enable the centralization of clinical workflow management and real-time analytics. Integrating these systems will have a sizable impact on customer organizations’ productivity and patient care.
Next Generation Nurse Call
Critical Alert’s nurse call solution brings a modern, badly needed upgrade to legacy systems, extending both their life and feature-set. A single mobile- or desktop-enabled user-interface brings vital contextual information about requests while allowing for centralized answering of nurse call alerts and management of workflows and assignments. These streamlined workflows reduce noise and clinical interruptions while improving responsiveness.
Physiological Monitoring – Less Noise, More Signal
The FDA-cleared offering intelligently routes context-rich alarm notifications from clinical systems to TigerFlow+. An easy-to-use workflow builder ensures alerts are prioritized accordingly and are routed to the appropriate caregiver, suppressing unnecessary noise. The filtering, mobilization, and escalation of alerts pairs with TigerConnect Teams, allowing for prompt responses in critical situations.
Smart Bed Alarms for Enhanced Patient Safety
Integrations with popular smart bed systems provide remote monitoring of bed status details, informing nurses whether they should walk or run to a patient’s room. Staff can review and adjust bed compliance settings from their mobile device and receive fall prevention notifications if safe-bed configuration is compromised.
Real-time Location System (RTLS) Measures What Matters
The integration of RTLS with a deployed nurse call application greatly enhances the data available to clinical leadership. The combined TigerConnect/Critical Alert offering enables real-time tracking of staff location (presence) and time spent on tasks, providing deeper insights into resource planning, workflow effectiveness and ongoing process improvement initiatives.
Advanced Analytics for Deeper Workflow Insights
A better understanding of patient behavior and workflows helps reveal areas for optimization that can lead to improved patient care and staff efficacy. The new combined platform capabilities centralize the collection and tracking of patient event data and nurse task efficiency, turning insights into action. Advanced analytics also allow for identifying, documenting, and benchmarking responsiveness, compliance, resource allocation, and patient throughput across the health system.
Availability
This new integrated functionality is expected to be available to TigerConnect customers in Q1 of 2021.
