Aastra installation

The contract represents its largest DECT installation to date and reinforces Aastra’s position at the forefront of the global SIP-DECT market for premise-based mobility requirements.

The hospital, which treats 70,000 patients and has 390,000 outpatient visits every year from Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, is renowned for its highly specialised care. Its medical teams carry out 45,000 operations annually from the hospital’s 76 operating rooms – so fast, reliable, mobile communications are critical, particularly when finding staff at short notice to deal with urgent situations such as cardiac arrests.

Rigshospitalet awarded the contract to Aastra following a competitive tender process, impressed by the quality and scalability of Aastra’s SIP-DECT® solution as well as its integration capabilities with both Aastra and third party products. Rigshospitalet also selected Aastra because of its features dedicated for the healthcare sector such as nurse or porter calls, alarms and notification. The locating capabilities help to pinpoint more quickly emergency situations such as attack alarms to meet mission critical requirements.

Aastra has already deployed a total of 521 indoor and outdoor base stations and 3,150 DECT handsets are currently live. They are all integrated with Aastra’s MX-ONE® call manager, which is used by 7,000 hospital staff. Using the SIP-DECT handsets, staff have easy access to the hospital’s directory while on the move and, at the touch of a button, can quickly reach out to colleagues if there is an emergency or they need assistance.

The key focus to date has been migrating doctors, nurses and administrators from voice initiated trauma calls to a more efficient text message based trauma solution. This solution provides the highest level of patient safety – with fast, reliable communications and reporting which automatically monitor the responses.  Alerts are integrated with the hospital’s processes, enhancing Rigshospitalet’s ability to operate with maximum efficiency. The solution is easy to use, whether a team co-ordinator needs to alert teams that an ambulance is arriving or a member of staff can easily acknowledge that a situation has been dealt with.

In trauma situations, alerting and securing the right teams are vital. The new text message trauma call solution makes it far easier to manage and locate teams. Using text messages, co-ordinators can quickly contact relevant members of staff to request immediate help with a particular patient. With a simple click, hospital staff can respond, alerting the trauma team co-ordinator to their status, with messages such as ‘I accept the job’, ‘I am on the job’ or ‘I’ve terminated my task’. If the initial people asked to help with the trauma are busy dealing with another patient, the trauma team co-ordinator can escalate the communications, quickly alerting and locating other members of staff.

Previously, all Rigshospitalet departments had separate systems and requirements. Aastra conducted a workshop with the various departments to fully understand their needs and jointly agree a route forward which would provide benefits and process optimisation across the teams and departments for the whole hospital.

Ole Bergsten Project Manager, Finance & Strategic Department from Rigshospitalet comments, “Our previous DECT solution lacked the specific healthcare applications which Aastra provides. With our Aastra solution we have been able to track alerts and make our processes far more efficient. Aastra’s technology enables us to combine data from our various different sources and use it in different ways – such as for a trauma or acute call. With Aastra, we have the complete communications solution – from our call manager to our handsets. Their solution provides us with a future growth path, not only to add other Aastra products but also with the flexibility to add niche healthcare products from different suppliers, should we choose to.”

Lars Røjgaard Andersen Services & Solution Director at Aastra Denmark adds, “Winning such a large tender from Rigshospitalet is a great endorsement that Aastra is leading the market with our best of breed SIP-DECT technology and compelling healthcare features. Whilst the voice quality through our handsets is extremely high, it is the added value applications such as text messaging, notification features and location tools which make our SIP-DECT solutions ideal for a hospital environment. Aastra’s solution is at the heart of the Rigshospitalet’s processes and is already contributing to significant productivity enhancements.”

DECT technology is ideal for campus style environments such as hospitals as it operates in its own spectrum and doesn’t compete for bandwidth with other devices, resulting in better quality and security through voice encryption and special encryption algorithms. DECT also requires considerably less power than Wi-Fi and therefore DECT phones have much longer talk and standby times.

SIP-DECT combines the tried-and-tested DECT technology with SIP innovation to provide great flexibility, as SIP-DECT can be used with Aastra and third-party call managers as well as hosted solutions. Aastra’s SIP-DECT can easily be rolled out across an IP network environment.

In addition to value added features such as alerts and notification, Aastra’s SIP-DECT solution is in high demand in the healthcare sector because of its ability to provide security in the message delivery process. One lost message could result in a fatal incident so Aastra has included message acknowledgement buttons in its handsets. Voice quality is also critical in the healthcare sector and is extremely high in Aastra handsets.

Aastra’s SIP-DECT is highly scalable and includes a choice of handsets to suit a range of business requirements and vertical market requirements.