Connexall

Implement Hospital Communications Tech Like Lives Depend on It

Antonio Carvalho — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 13:00:00 +0000

To read: ~ 5 minutes

When hospitals deploy new information and communications technology, the implementation process demands significant investment in time, resources, and coordination across clinical and IT teams.

This complexity isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Thoughtful implementation protects what matters most: the clinicians who use these systems daily and the patients who depend on them. Rush the process or skip critical steps, and even sophisticated technology becomes just another source of frustration on an already overwhelmed hospital floor.

The key is managing implementation with the same clinical rigor you’d apply to any intervention that touches patient safety.

Monica Trepicone, a registered nurse, spent 15 years of her clinical career in the operating room. And now, as a ClinicalInformatics Specialist- RN at Connexall, she helps hospitals deploy technologies that connect people, tasks, and devices.

As a result, she has a deep understanding of what’s at stake in a clinical setting and why communications systems require the resource-intensive implementation approach they receive.

Crossed wires put patients at risk

Hospital staff work in high-pressure environments, where split-second decisions can have lasting consequences. Routine workflows and intuitive equipment are essential, as they enable healthcare staff to focus on completing the task at hand, rather than worrying about how to accomplish it.

When new tools disrupt established workflows, they create a cognitive burden at the worst possible time. Staff who can normally navigate critical moments without pause suddenly have to stop and figure out how to proceed. And in some cases, the difficulty of using the new tool hinders them from actually moving forward.

Recognizing the stakes, operating rooms scrutinize new equipment heavily. “In the operating room, you can’t just bring in something that we’ve never touched or felt before,” Trepicone explains. She notes that staff rigorously vet even seemingly simple adjustments, like switching out the types of sterile gloves. They go to great lengths to ensure that the tactile sensitivity and quality are conducive to the work they need to perform. If they aren’t, they could compromise patient safety and outcomes.

Communications failures are equally as dangerous. When alarms don’t reach the right people at the right time, patient safety suffers just as much as it would with faulty surgical equipment. Patients fall, V-tach events go unnoticed, and rapid response teams take longer to assemble.

Evaluating communications platforms with OR-level scrutiny

Trepicone’s experience has shown her that new communications technologies, such as alarm management and fall prevention systems, require the same rigorous evaluation that we apply to medical supplies in the operating room.

Devoting time and resources to the implementation process helps ensure that they blend into existing workflows and work as intended from the very start.

While the immediacy of this alignment might be a nice-to-have in some industries, it’s non-negotiable in a clinical setting. Like sterile gloves in the OR, hospital staff must be able to pick up these tools quickly, without disruption, because there isn’t space for hesitation or trial-and-error when lives are on the line.

Through Trepicone’s work, she’s also identified three areas where implementation teams need to direct their careful attention.

Engaging clinical stakeholders

Implementation teams must embed their own clinical experts to engage with the hospital’s clinical staff from the very beginning. “We don’t implement anything without having the nursing team at the table,” Trepicone shares. “We are nurses, so it’s nurses speaking with nurses.”

This peer-to-peer interaction is essential. It enables the implementation team to establish and build trust with the hospital staff who will eventually use the communications solution. Staff members are more likely to buy into the implementation process when it involves experts who understand their daily pressures.

This buy-in is necessary for adoption and, in turn, patient safety. Reflecting on projects she’s worked on in her career, Trepicone says, “I’ve been in facilities where the phone is in a drawer,” referencing a device used as part of a broader alarm notification system. “Why is it in a drawer? Well, because the implementation team didn’t have that initial buy-in.”

When communications systems aren’t used consistently, it creates confusion and forces staff to develop workarounds that are often less reliable and lead to missed or delayed responses during critical moments.

Learn more about how we build trust with clinicians in this blog.

Assessing clinical workflows

It’s also important for implementation teams to take the time to understand how hospitals currently operate before introducing new systems. When clinical experts are involved on the implementation side, this is far easier to accomplish.

Trepicone notes that her team at Connexall will visit hospitals in person to get the lay of the land. “We will go on site and do an assessment,” she explains. “We speak with the key end users, the clinicians and nurse managers, to identify any pain points they have.” They conduct this assessment across units within the same hospital, given that each tends to have its own unique processes.

With a deeper understanding of established workflows, and how they differ from unit to unit, it’s easier to determine where new solutions can help and how to deploy them without causing dangerous disruption.

Testing and refining solutions

What works on paper doesn’t always work in practice, making testing an important part of the implementation process.

Trepicone and the team at Connexall aim to test new communications solutions in real-world settings, which are fast-paced and unpredictable, rather than controlled demo environments. This is the only way to see whether the solutions are capable of performing under pressure, and if they can help clinicians do the same without getting in the way.

For the Connexall team, implementation doesn’t end when the communications system goes live in the hospital. They stay connected with the hospital to gather and respond to feedback so that the system continues to serve clinicians over time.

The team typically gives hospitals a two-week window to use the solution and document any speed bumps. Following that period, the team will come in and make any required changes. For example, with an alarm management system, they might adjust who gets notified (and how quickly) in different clinical scenarios.

Moving forward with discipline

When communications solutions break down in a hospital, it disrupts day-to-day work and compromises patient safety. As a result, they require the same time-intensive evaluation that surgical supplies and instruments receive.

Implementation teams need to uphold this level of rigor now, and continue to do so as communications technologies advance. Trepicone shares that virtual nursing, i.e., using telehealth platforms to allow nurses to assess patients and provide guidance without being physically present, is one noteworthy development on the horizon.

Virtual nursing platforms hold significant potential to address staffing challenges and improve access to quality care. While the temptation to move quickly is strong, implementation teams must still proceed with caution and care to ensure that they enhance, not disrupt, workflows critical to patient safety.

The post Implement Hospital Communications Tech Like Lives Depend on It appeared first on Connexall.

How to Implement Alarm Management Systems That Deserve Your Clinicians’ Trust

Antonio Carvalho — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:00:15 +0000

To read: ~ 5 minutes

Technology skepticism is well-justified in hospitals, as efficiency and staff satisfaction aren’t the only outcomes on the line. If technology breaks down in a clinical setting, it also compromises patient safety, putting lives at risk. As a result, hospital leaders are wise to approach it with caution.

However, there is a fine line between healthy skepticism and counterproductive resistance. Avoiding advancement too heavily could lead hospitals to fall behind and miss out on all of the benefits it carries. When new technologies, like modern alarm management systems, are implemented successfully, they aren’t simply benign. They can be immensely advantageous, improving the lives of staff and patients.

Yet even when leaders do purchase and implement new tools with the potential to optimize how work gets done, they are often abandoned or underutilized due to distrust among staff.

Monica Trepicone, who is a registered nurse, is familiar with the issue from the hospital and vendor sides. During her 18 years as a registered nurse, 15 of which she spent in the OR, she watched well-intentioned alarm management systems fail. Now, as one of our Clinical Informatics Specialists, she helps hospitals avoid failure and maximize their tech investments, for the sake of their clinicians and patients.

See it to believe it

When alarm management solutions fail, it typically has little to do with the solutions themselves. More often than not, failure is actually rooted in distrust among the clinicians meant to use them.

This distrust is both innate and learned.

Nurses are naturally and rightfully wary of new systems they haven’t physically validated themselves. “You can’t just bring in something that we haven’t touched or felt before. We have to understand how the tool works,” Trepicone says, reflecting on her time as an OR nurse. “We need to see how it’s actually going to work in our day-to-day activities.”

Even if hospitals get alarm management systems up and running, misalignment with the nuances of their specific clinical workflows can gradually erode confidence in the system. Trepicone has seen hospitals route alarms to “everybody, all of the nursing staff, all the technicians at once,” overwhelming nurses with non-actionable or irrelevant alerts and making it difficult to identify truly critical patient events.

When alarm management systems create alarm fatigue and inhibit rapid response, nursing teams lose trust. They abandon the system that was supposed to help them and develop complex workarounds just to get through their shift. While this demonstrates their ingenuity and resilience, it defeats the purpose of putting new tech in place.

The importance of earning trust

To implement alarm management systems that clinicians actually want to use, hospitals must earn and maintain the trust of nursing teams. “If you don’t have buy-in from the nursing staff that will utilize the equipment, it’s not going to be a successful project,” Trepicone states.

We help hospitals achieve this by embedding technical and clinical experts, like Trepicone, to engage with clinical staff throughout the implementation process. These experts can help establish trust early on and maintain it by creating alarm management systems that genuinely work in practice.

Below, we outline our implementation process to showcase how we build clinician trust every step of the way.

How to implement a trustworthy alarm management system

Step 1: On-site assessment.

Every hospital is unique, so Connexall’s team starts with an on-site assessment. This allows them to figure out what they are working with before they design or build anything.

The team takes great care to involve nursing staff at this discovery stage. This provides them with a realistic view of the current environment, and it also offers an opportunity to demonstrate clinical expertise and build trust with the people who will eventually use the system.

For example, they identify who will use the alarm management system in each unit and, importantly, what they call themselves. In many cases, different units use different job titles for the same role. One unit might have a “nursing supervisor,” while another might have a “nurse manager,” with both people performing the same duties.

Trepicone’s team works with hospitals to understand their naming conventions across units, as this helps avoid issues with alert routing when setting up the system later on.

Step 2: Workflow observation and documentation

Once they get the lay of the land, they observe key players to understand how they operate and interact with alerts in their day-to-day work.

Connexall’s team typically enters this stage with a variety of questions to answer, like:

What type of alerts are used in this unit?
Who typically receives them first: a nursing assistant, a unit clerk, someone else?
Are they going to a group of people: the respiratory therapy team, the ICU, another group?
How do physical constraints, time pressure, or competing priorities affect their ability to respond?

Trepicone recalls watching a nurse perform trach care while wearing their PPE to see how they would handle an alert when it popped up on their phone.

Step 3: System configuration

The information Connexall’s team gathers during their workflow observation helps them determine who should receive which alerts and when. This allows them to configure the alarm management system in a way that aligns with how work actually happens.

For example, Trepicone shares that they typically set up a three-level routing system based on how nurses report to each other. The system will send an alert to a patient’s primary nurse first. If they don’t respond, it will go to a secondary point of contact. If neither is available, it will go to a backup, typically a charge nurse or nurse manager.

They also establish clear protocols to ensure that the timing and escalation of alerts align with their level of urgency. While a critical code blue alert will climb to the top more quickly, or immediately trigger all three levels simultaneously, a routine request for water will not. This helps prevent alarm fatigue by ensuring that the right alert gets to the right person at the right time without creating unnecessary noise in the process

Step 4: Hands-on testing with clinical staff

Finally, the team puts the system to the test by deploying it in a real patient care setting. This is the only way to see whether it will help or hinder clinicians managing real patients under real pressure.

“What looks good on paper may not actually work in the actual scenario,” Trepicone says, noting situations can arise that they hadn’t considered or expected during earlier stages. For example, they’ve seen cases where alarms weren’t even reaching the Connexall alert system due to loose wires in the underlying hardware.

Her team treats these scenarios as opportunities for ongoing improvement. They work with hospital staff and other vendors to continuously adjust the system, until it fully blends into everyday operations.

Technology that truly serves clinicians

Getting clinicians to adopt new technologies comes down to building and maintaining trust.

By engaging with clinicians at each stage of the alarm management implementation process, from information gathering to design to testing, Connexall’s team establishes trust early on and delivers a solution that doesn’t break it.

This helps hospitals avoid the all-too-common problem of their brand-new tool sitting unused, either because clinicians feared it or ran into problems trying to make it work. Instead, hospitals get what they actually need: an alarm management system that clinicians want to use, because it genuinely makes their job easier and allows them to deliver better patient care.

The post How to Implement Alarm Management Systems That Deserve Your Clinicians’ Trust appeared first on Connexall.

How to Prevent Patient Falls with Environmental Alerts

Antonio Carvalho — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 18:47:56 +0000

To read: ~ 6 minutes

Hospitals are places of healing, where skilled professionals work tirelessly to help those in need. Yet hospitalization can introduce additional risks unrelated to a patient’s condition. One in 10 patients will experience an adverse event during hospitalization, per research in the Journal of Patient Safety, with falls representing one of the most challenging issues for care teams to prevent.

The same research highlights that 25% to 50% of patients who fall suffer injuries, and these events can be costly. The average cost for a serious fall with injury amounts to $14,056 per patient, according to a report from the Health Research and Educational Trust (in partnership with the American Hospital Association and the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare).

What makes falls especially frustrating for dedicated healthcare providers is that many are preventable. However, systems designed to help prevent falls can generate frequent non-actionable alerts, desensitizing staff to true warnings that demand immediate attention.

Genuine alerts must be taken seriously in the moment. For some healthcare facilities, this requires reimagining how alarms are triggered and how alerts get delivered.

Searching for a diagnosis

Beant Singh is well aware of the frustration caused by disruptive and ineffective fall prevention systems, and he’s spent over seven years working on the solution as a Team Lead for Solution Delivery and Implementation at Connexall.

When Glacier View Lodge, a long-term care facility in British Columbia, reached out, Beant and his team collaborated on something new. They went on-site to evaluate the situation before recommending a solution. While every healthcare facility faces similar surface-level challenges, his team knows the space, daily routines, and root causes often differ.

Rapid response roadblocks

Glacier View Lodge’s special care unit uses bed pad sensors to alert caregivers, sending fall risk notifications directly to their phones. Through careful workflow observation and staff interviews, the Connexall team identified three issues with their current system.

Sensors weren’t reliably warning staff about true fall risks. When a resident slipped out of bed, they dragged the pressure-sensitive pads with them because of the slippery mattress. Then, no alarm sounded. Meanwhile, staff would also feel overwhelmed by the number of false alarms set off by the bed pads while attending to facility residents.

The system generated excessive false alarms, which eroded staff confidence in the technology. “Even if they were shifting a little bit on the bed, like they were turning to one side, that was also triggering the alarm,” Singh explains. These frequent false positives created a “boy who cried wolf” effect, where genuine alarms risked being dismissed as non-actionable.

The notification method didn’t align with the reality of day-to-day workflows. Care teams often found themselves unable to check their phones during interactions with residents. “The other issue we had was that clinicians said, ‘If I’m with a [facility] resident and my hands are dirty and my phone is ringing, I don’t want to touch the phone. Or ‘I can’t look at the phone because I’m doing something like giving medication,’” Singh recalls. Additionally, the existing phone system limited the number of calls and alerts that could occur simultaneously, blocking bed exit alerts during busy periods.

When falls happen, they happen quickly (typically within 5-15 seconds of the patient getting out of bed). This tight window makes rapid response critical. However, all three scenarios prevented staff from responding to fall risks in a timely manner.

A lightbulb moment

Through listening to and learning from caregivers on the ground, the Connexall team conceived a new approach: Alert staff through environmental change.

The concept centered on a unit-wide lighting system, with a distinct light bulb outside of every resident’s room. Each bulb would shift from warm white to cool white when a fall risk was detected, except for the bulb outside the room that was triggering the alarm. That bulb would change to a blue color and blink to alert staff. At the same time, a marquee would display the room number of the bed exit and play a distinct tone.

The idea was that the visual and audible cues would enable caregivers to respond more quickly by providing immediate alerts. All hospital staff who saw the visual cue would be able to assist or call a nurse to help.

Preventing falls through environmental alerts

Bringing this system to life required deep collaboration between Connexall’s technical and clinical experts and Glacier View’s caregivers in the special care unit.

To start at the beginning: choosing a light bulb color.

Step 1: Lighting design

Color selection was critical. Beyond the default lighting change for non-affected rooms, the team needed to determine the best color for the blinking light outside of the room requiring attention.

The Connexall team started with red but found that it too closely mimicked the fire alarm. “We didn’t want residents to see the light and think there was a fire,” Singh shares. They ultimately settled on blue.

Staff would still receive a notification through the regular methods: phone notifications for bed pad alarms, the active alarm screen at the nursing station. At the same time, the new lighting system was up and running, and digital marquees were placed around the care unit to display the room number of the motion detection alarm (with a distinct tone to alert staff).

While the Connexall team worked on this lighting design system, they kept the bed pad sensor system in place so no alerts would be missed during the testing period.

Step 2: Alert system architecture

An innovative new solution was deployed to send alerts to the lighting design system and marquees.

The Connexall team implemented motion sensors as the core solution for fall detection and prevention. These sensors were strategically placed away from the bed to detect the specific vertical motion of residents’ feet as they come to the ground, which is a far more definitive sign of bed exit attempts than pressure-based detection.

The environmental lighting system and marquees were engineered to receive and display alerts generated by these sensors. Rather than relying on methods that often generated false alarms, this sensor could better distinguish between normal sleep movement and actual bed exit attempts, ensuring that accurate alerts translated into faster staff response times.

The sensors were integrated with both the environmental lighting system and the marquees to create multiple alert pathways. When a sensor detects a bed exit attempt, the system triggers the visual lighting changes throughout the unit, while a unique tone would sound and the room-specific information displayed on the marquees. This dual approach ensures staff receive immediate environmental awareness through the lighting changes, with detailed location data for comprehensive situational awareness.

Step 3: On-site implementation through testing and iterative refinement

Singh and his team rolled out the new alert system over a four-day testing period in the special care unit. During that time, they physically simulated resident movements to determine optimal sensor placement and sensitivity settings.

The testing shed light on scenarios they hadn’t initially considered. For example, given high-fall risk residents use very low beds, their sheet movement and arm movement during sleep triggered false alarms. The team responded by progressively restricting the sensor’s field of view.

As part of the design, switches were placed outside resident rooms, allowing staff to control when the system was armed, activating the alarm when a resident was in bed and deactivating the alarm before entering the room to avoid inadvertently triggering the alert system. The sensors were also always on: the switch at the door allowed the sensor to send the motion detection to the alerting system.

The smart bulbs provided another benefit: Connexall could slowly dim the lights at night and slowly raise them in the morning. The advantages of this circadian lighting system extend beyond improved sleep. Such systems are also linked to additional clinical benefits, like improved cognitive performance, mood, and overall health and recovery.

Step 4: System validation and continuous feedback

Caregivers noticed the effects of the implementation immediately. On the first night the system was operational, it helped prevent two falls.

The following day, as the next shift arrived, the staff present for that first night enthusiastically shared details with their colleagues and showed them how to use the new system. They did so of their own accord, simply because they saw the value and wanted others to experience it as well.

The Connexall team set up weekly calls to gather ongoing feedback from staff and plan new features, like a button for the staff to indicate when they encountered a false alarm.

Step 5: Post-implementation optimization

Implementation isn’t the end of the story. Connexall and Glacier View worked together to optimize sensor performance through data analysis and algorithm refinement. False alarms have reduced by 95%, thanks to the inclusion of the “false alarm” button for staff.

The team systematically evaluated both infrared and thermal sensor technologies to determine the most reliable bed exit detection method. Through testing and data analysis, they determined that thermal sensors provided superior accuracy in differentiating between human movement and environmental factors like sheet movement.

Moving forward, the facility will transition to thermal sensors as the primary fall prevention technology. The new sensors will have the capacity to adjust the alerting algorithm based on resident mobility. This capability will serve individual medical and physical needs.

Zero falls in June

This partnership demonstrates that the best solution to a problem, no matter how common, isn’t always immediately obvious. Finding the best way forward requires taking a closer look at the specific situation to understand how people work and determine what they need to work better.

By adopting a solution tailored to their unique circumstances, Glacier View cut down alarm volume significantly. The environmental alert method also helped improve response time to true alarms. It eliminated the need for caregivers to check their phones, saving them precious seconds, and it also expanded awareness of the alarm beyond the resident’s assigned caregiver to anyone present in the area. Singh recalls an early incident where a member of the housekeeping staff saw the light blinking. They asked the resident to stay in bed, called for help, and ultimately prevented the fall.

Better response time had a swift and visible impact on resident safety. During the June pilot period in the special care unit, the facility recorded zero falls, down from five the month prior. In the four months after the pilot period, there are still no reported falls. Other units took note of the improvement and, after hearing positive feedback from special care staff, requested the same system be implemented in their units. Connexall is planning to implement the system site-wide with multi-factoral sensors as well.

Good news spreads quickly, especially when it comes to patient safety.

The post How to Prevent Patient Falls with Environmental Alerts appeared first on Connexall.

How Hospitals Can Save Their Tech Investments and Patient Lives

Antonio Carvalho — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 13:00:42 +0000

To read: ~ 6 minutes

Hospitals pour millions of dollars into technology meant to improve operational efficiency and patient safety. The average IT expense for US hospitals in 2023 was $9.51M, per Definitive Healthcare. For hospitals with 250+ beds, this figure reached $33.71M.

However, many solutions don’t work as intended, creating more problems than they solve.

The impact goes beyond wasted investment dollars. Workloads increase, patient care suffers, and new safety risks emerge.

But the root cause is rarely defective tech. Many hospitals install systems without anticipating how they’ll actually fit into daily clinical work. The misalignment isn’t their fault: sometimes it’s difficult to predict how a tool will work, or not, until it’s actively adopted in a real-world setting.

Hospitals running into challenges post-implementation typically weigh a few options: get rid of the system, spend more money to replace it, or work around the inefficiency. All waste valuable resources that could be better spent improving the lives of the patients they serve.

There is another, better way forward. It can save both the financial investment and address the human impact.

A technology partnership at a crossroads

Ashley Hunsucker, Lead Clinical Informatics Specialist for Connexall’s Clinical Elevate Program, is no stranger to this situation. In her work with Connexall, she applies clinical expertise from the NICU to help hospitals evaluate the performance of the technologies they choose to adopt.

With Novant Health, a health system serving North and South Carolina, the challenge was clear. Novant had implemented Connexall’s centralized patient monitoring and communications solution to improve alarm management and care team collaboration, but the solution wasn’t delivering the expected results. Telemetry technicians were bypassing the notification system entirely, calling nurses directly about patient alerts.

Talk don’t walk

Post-implementation issues don’t usually stem from the technology itself. Often, they arise from a disconnect between how the solution was designed to work and how it actually gets used.

More than a vendor, hospitals need a true technology partner that will stick around after implementation and help them realize the full potential of the solution. Hunsucker and her team carried this mindset into working with Novant Health, treating it as a recovery effort that required looking beyond technology to the people who use it every day.

When Connexall began working with Novant, they indicated a desire to explore alternatives for central telemetry alarm management. “So we went in as recovery,” Ashley Hunsucker shared.

Hunsucker’s team started with a powerful exercise: listening.

Helping technology and healthcare workers live up to their full potential

Step 1: Stakeholder listening and problem validation

Hunsucker’s team started by joining Novant’s existing meetings with stakeholders. They didn’t come with immediate solutions. They came to learn more about Novant’s daily experiences and frustrations.

“We listened,” she shares. “We let them present the information their task force had gathered. And we started asking questions based on that information.”

This probing allowed Hunsucker to better understand the surface-level problem: teletechnicians avoided using the Connexall notification system. They opted to call nurses directly instead, prompting the task force to assume employees preferred this workaround and recommend pulling Connexall.

Step 2: Workflow analysis and root cause identification

Once they understood the surface-level problem, both teams worked together to gain insight into how different clinical groups were doing their work.

Mapping workflows revealed the root cause of the issue: teletechnicians were handling critical patient alerts inconsistently. Some took 10 seconds to dispatch alerts to nurses, while others took much longer. More importantly, technicians were double-pinging nurses, sending digital notifications and making phone calls about the same patient event.

This had trained nurses to become numb to the digital system and wait for calls to determine if notifications were urgent. Since nurses weren’t responding to the notifications, technicians eventually gave up on the system entirely and just resorted to calls as the default.

However, nurses didn’t actually want all those calls—they found them frustrating and disruptive, but had been conditioned to assume that’s simply how the system worked.

Step 3: Pilot launch and reset of organizational culture

Two workflows needed to be cleaned up: the clinical workflow and the technician workflow. Hunsucker’s and Novant’s teams worked to get nurses to trust digital alerts again and train technicians to use standard processes instead of double-pinging.

The teams started with the clinical side, launching a pilot in Novant’s cardiac ICU unit. They configured technical changes to reduce alarm frequency, using intelligent suspension features that filtered out non-actionable alarms by giving them time to self-correct. Using Power BI analytics, they monitored performance over time to determine if and how they needed to adjust the duration of the self-correction window.

On the technician side, they created standardized training materials and established clear expectations for alert dispatch timing and escalation to eliminate double-pinging.

Step 4: System-wide rollout with ongoing support

Both teams worked to expand improvements across Novant’s facilities. The rollout included continuous data monitoring and workflow optimization based on real-world usage patterns.

The relationship between Connexall and Novant took a turn for the better during this process. What had started as a recovery situation turned into a collaborative partnership focused on ongoing dialogue.

Novant’s team helped develop new dashboard features specifically for Connexall’s centralized patient monitoring and communications solution. They provided valuable feedback on what they liked and didn’t like since they would be the end users of the final product.

Saving technology and saving lives with Novant Health

This process reveals a crucial takeaway for hospitals: when implementation challenges arise, the solution typically lies in understanding how people work, not in removing or replacing technology.

The results of this exploratory approach are significant. “The data showed that our efforts decreased alarms by 40%–60% across Novant’s facilities,” Hunsucker shares, reflecting on her team’s work with Novant to reduce non-actionable alarms. The pilot unit improved so dramatically that staff initially thought something was broken because the work environment had become so quiet.

Workflow improvements directly impact patient safety. In Novant’s case, the use of intelligent alarm suspension not only reduced the number of non-actionable alarms but also made it easier for true alarms to be taken seriously in critical moments. During the pilot period, this saved a life. A patient went into V-tach, and the initial alarm fell through the cracks. However, the new system held the alert for about 10 seconds to see if it would self-correct, which it did not, then automatically dispatched the alert to a nurse who was able to respond immediately and prevent an asystole event.

Hunsucker and Novant’s story demonstrates the power of partnership in technology optimization. By actively listening to and learning from each other, they were able to strengthen the implementation, save lives, and build entirely new solutions together.

The post How Hospitals Can Save Their Tech Investments and Patient Lives appeared first on Connexall.

The Human Factors Revolution: Why Healthcare Technology Success Depends on Clinical Expertise

Antonio Carvalho — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:00:51 +0000

To read: ~ 5 minutes

“They believe they can do it themselves, and then three days later: staff are revolting.”

This is what happens when healthcare technology vendors skip the clinical expertise and go straight to technical deployment. Implementations falter. Staff put away their devices faster than kids who’ve tired of their latest shiny new toy.

Despite billions being invested in healthcare technology, these kinds of implementation failures remain stubbornly common.

The entire healthcare technology industry is operating under a dangerous assumption—that better features and more advanced capabilities will automatically drive adoption and outcomes. This “technical-first” mindset has created a paradox where the more sophisticated our solutions become, the more likely they are to fail in real clinical environments.

The missing ingredient isn’t always better technology: it’s a better understanding of the humans who use it.

Human factors engineering (the science of designing technology around how people actually work rather than how we think they should work) offers a fundamentally different approach. Instead of asking clinicians to adapt to technology, it asks technology to adapt to clinicians. And the companies that embrace this shift are seeing better implementation, smoother adoption and a significant competitive advantage.

A Technological Tunnel Vision

Healthcare technology companies consistently develop and implement solutions without adequate understanding of how clinicians actually work under pressure. This blindspot manifests in a few critical ways:

The patient gets lost in the technology. “There is a patient, a family member, behind that technology,” explains Ericka Carter, a clinical informatics expert with over 20 years of frontline nursing experience. “Sometimes technology vendors, or even those who are building it, forget that, or miss that. And that has to come first.”

When vendors focus too much on technical specifications and integration capabilities, they lose sight of the human ecosystem that technology is meant to serve. Their solutions may work perfectly in a testing environment, but create chaos when deployed in a busy emergency department.

Clinical voices are frequently excluded from design decisions. Vendors often consult the people who will use the technology—nurses, physicians, and other frontline staff—last (or not at all) in the design process. This creates a fundamental disconnect between what technology companies think clinicians need and what actually works in high-pressure clinical environments.

“If the nurses aren’t being heard, if they are not embedded in the process, the technology will not be successful,” Carter notes. Yet most healthcare technology companies treat clinical input as optional feedback rather than essential design criteria.

The stakes are higher than most realize. Without clinical-centered design, even technically superior solutions fail rapidly—often within days of implementation. This leads to wasted implementation investments, staff frustration, and ultimately compromised patient care quality.

The timeline from deployment to failure can be shockingly short. When clinical needs aren’t understood upfront, staff resistance builds quickly, creating a cycle where technology becomes an impediment rather than an enabler of better care. Dedicated clinicians are forced to develop workarounds, creating unofficial systems and processes to navigate around the next technology that was meant to help them. These workarounds, while demonstrating the ingenuity of healthcare professionals, create additional cognitive load and safety risks.

The Case for Human-Centered Healthcare Technology

Embedding clinical expertise and human factors principles into the entire product lifecycle creates measurable competitive advantages for modern healthcare technology vendors. This approach relies on a shift in POV when it comes to implementation:

Design Philosophy for Patients and Clinicians

Companies should evaluate every technology decision through the lens of patient impact and caregiver enablement. This means starting with a fundamental question: “How does this technology help clinicians provide better patient care?”

The most successful implementations focus on workflow integration rather than workflow disruption. As Carter explains, “It’s critical for us to design technology that is going to be easy to use, efficient, and also sustainable.”

Clinical Expertise as Competitive Differentiator

Companies that embed clinical professionals in their product teams gain insights that purely technical teams miss. These clinical experts can identify problematic implementation approaches before they cause adoption failures.

“Having that clinical background, we can say, ‘We don’t necessarily recommend that. Your nurses are going to throw their phones if you do that,'” Carter observes. This kind of insight—knowing not just what technically works but what clinically works—prevents costly implementation failures.

Consider the following: at most hospitals, 10% of patients generate 80% of alerts. A purely technical solution might try to improve alert management broadly, but any seasoned clinician will tell you that targeted interventions for high-alert patients can solve much of the problem with far less complexity.

Implementation as Clinical Consulting

The most successful healthcare technology companies position themselves as clinical consultants who happen to use technology rather than technology vendors who serve healthcare. This shift changes the entire relationship dynamic.

Instead of asking, “How can we deploy this technology?” the question becomes, “How can we solve this clinical problem?” The technology becomes a tool in service of clinical outcomes rather than an end in itself.

Three Strategic Principles for Transformation

Organizations ready to make this shift can implement three core strategic principles:

1. Build Clinical Advisory Capabilities into Product Teams

Rather than treating clinical input as optional feedback, embed clinical professionals directly into product development teams. These aren’t just consultants that companies bring in for validation, they’re core team members who help shape product strategy from the ground up.

This prevents technically sound solutions from failing because they don’t account for cognitive load, workflow interruptions, or the time pressures that define clinical practice.

2. Design for Cognitive Load Reduction

Every feature should reduce rather than increase the mental effort required from clinicians. This means prioritizing information delivery: “Making sure the right information is getting to the right people at the right time and in a prioritized way.”

Understanding cognitive load is crucial because information overload leads to alert fatigue, which decreases patient safety. As healthcare systems become more integrated, the temptation to “just add that notification” increases, but clinical expertise can help identify what information truly needs immediate attention.

3. Measure Human Impact Alongside Technical Metrics

Track clinician satisfaction and workflow efficiency as primary success metrics. Technical metrics like system uptime and integration speed matter, but they fail to predict adoption success.

“A lot of times it’s just the verbal feedback of ‘Oh my, this has been so helpful.’ It is the expression of feeling less overwhelmed,” Carter explains. These human impact measures often predict long-term success better than traditional technical metrics.

An Inevitable Shift

Healthcare systems are becoming more sophisticated buyers of technology. They increasingly evaluate vendors not just on technical capabilities but on their ability to ensure successful adoption and measurable outcomes.

The industry is also grappling with increasing clinician burnout and the need for cognitive load reduction as healthcare systems prioritize staff retention. “Information overload, and I hate to say it, but alert fatigue” is becoming more common “as more systems become integrated,” Carter notes.

This creates a market opportunity for companies that can demonstrate not just what their technology does, but how it reduces burden and improves workflow for the humans who use it.

The ROI of Human-Centered Design

The companies that have embraced this approach are seeing measurable results. Take alarm management as an example: organizations implementing clinical-led approaches achieve dramatic improvements—in some cases, 43% reductions in alarm volume while maintaining or improving patient safety.

Companies like Connexall, who embed clinical expertise throughout their process, consistently work more effectively for clinical staff. This isn’t just about being nice to nurses: it’s about creating technology that actually works in clinical environments.

The Choice Ahead

The industry is at an inflection point. Clinical expertise is becoming the key differentiator, and companies that embed human factors engineering now will establish clinical partnerships that are difficult for competitors to replicate later.

The question isn’t whether this shift will happen, it’s whether your organization will move with the times or get left behind. The companies that prioritize clinical expertise will transform from technology vendors into trusted clinical partners, and that transformation will determine who survives the next phase of healthcare technology evolution.

The choice is clear: continue competing on features and specifications or start competing on human understanding and clinical outcomes.

The companies that choose the latter will discover that the best technology isn’t just technically sophisticated—it’s humanely intelligent.

The post The Human Factors Revolution: Why Healthcare Technology Success Depends on Clinical Expertise appeared first on Connexall.

Human-First Healthcare Support: Observe, Report, Adapt

Antonio Carvalho — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 14:00:36 +0000

To read: ~ 6 minutes

If you’re responsible for deploying a communications system in a hospital, here’s what Ericka Carter (MSN, RN), Clinical Informatics Specialist at Connexall wants you to remember:

Behind every alert, every workflow change, every technology decision is a patient whose life depends on it working.

For Carter, whose background is in both emergency nursing, informatics, and change management, she sees a direct line of impact. “You’re caring for the people caring for patients,” she says, and your goal should be to implement communication systems that reflect the needs of staff, their environment, and those patients who will ultimately benefit.

(If only it were that easy.)

Bridging the Communication Tool Gap While Overcoming Change Resistance

Within any given hospital or healthcare organization you’re sure to find a complex web of communication systems, and most likely: a clinical staff who are inherently resistant to change. Hospitals are living organisms. Each department develops its own communication tools and workflows tailored to their specific needs, which create silos that impede efficient patient care coordination.

Carter has seen this problem in her work as an informatics specialist, “There’s often disparate systems that have to be unified into one space. Bedside nurses need something different than L&D nurses, and often they’re using different tools to communicate.”

These communication workarounds create non-standard workflows that don’t translate beyond individual teams, resistance from staff who fear disrupting patient care, and information overload from multiple unintegrated channels. The hard truth: the systems clinicians are using to protect the consistency of patient care might actually be detrimental to it.

Human-Centered Implementation Through Systematic Observation and Trust-Building Resistance

As an antidote, Carter thinks about tech from a uniquely human perspective.

“It’s critical for us to design technology that will be easy to use, efficient, and also sustainable.” She says, “It’s got to be embedded into the workflow of the clinicians.”

For Carter, successful implementation requires understanding existing workflows through direct observation before introducing changes. This sustained observation builds trust and allows her to demonstrate value through listening to needs, rather than imposing solutions.

If you’re a clinical informatics specialist, nursing leader, or part of a healthcare implementation team, you can use Carter’s techniques—grounded in human factors engineering—to overcome resistance to change while ensuring patient safety and operational efficiency throughout your implementation.

The Process: 5-Steps to Trust-Based Change

This five-step process is designed to help you implement healthcare communication systems that clinical staff will actually adopt and use long term—avoiding what Carter calls the “shiny toy” effect, where new technology gets initial enthusiasm but is quickly abandoned.

Step 1: Pre-Implementation Assessment and Stakeholder Preparation

Action steps: Review unit goals, quality metrics, safety metrics, and staff roles before any observation begins.

As a nurse herself, Carter understands how sensitive clinicians can be to interlopers. There’s instinctual suspicion: why are you here? What am I going to have to do differently because of you? To counteract this, Carter recommends a pre-implementation prep phase to align leadership on focused areas where communication gaps already exist.

In this phase, you’ll make initial assessments and focus entirely on the hospital’s current needs.

Step 2: Structured Direct Observation Across Multiple Contexts

Action steps: Document who answered each alert, response times, and what interrupted their workflow.

“Observe during a day shift where it’s properly staffed,” says Carter, “then observe a night shift and on the weekend. Are there variations in the staffing model?” Pay special attention to workarounds, when staff create their own processes to fill gaps. These workarounds reveal critical system failures that must be addressed, not simply replicated in your new system.

Ask: why did they create this workaround? What wasn’t working that forced them to fill the gap?

Step 3: Trust-Building Through Listening and Transparency

Action steps: Determine if resistance stems from past safety events, efficiency concerns, or change fatigue.

Building trust is a key component of Carter’s process. You could deliver the world’s best communication system, targeted to the exact right gaps in communication, but without trust: no one is going to use it.

The key to building a trusting relationship with clinical staff? “Listen, listen, listen!” Says Carter, “Listen to their concerns, and why they might be resistant.” Then, focus on those who will be most impacted and share your own observations in real-time during debriefs to demonstrate transparency. Tell them what you noticed and what you’ve seen, without judgment.

Step 4: Systematic Change Implementation with Feedback Loops

Action steps: implement start-stop-continue documentation to clarify expectations.

As you begin to implement your technology, create start-stop-continue documentation that clearly outlines: what communication methods to stop using, what new processes to start, and what existing workflows to continue. This eliminates confusion about which tools to use for specific communications.

Then lean on designated “Super Users” and create clear escalation processes for them to share any issues that they’re experiencing or hearing from their peers.

Step 5 – Post-setup: Track, listen, learn, and troubleshoot

Action steps: define your “measure of success” beyond technical usage tracking.

For Carter, proof of success is in the voices of users. “It’s the verbal feedback,” she says—that’s how she knows it’s working. “It’s the expression of ‘oh my, this has been so helpful,’ it’s that they’re feeling less overwhelmed, and not getting alert fatigue from any of their notifications.”

Define your own measures of success, and if you’re not getting there, go back to the early steps: observe, gather feedback, listen and respond.

Sustainable Adoption Through Embedded Workflows

When changes align with natural workflow patterns and meet clinicians where they are, you will likely see dramatic improvement in compliance and adoption.

Once you begin listening, you may find that even minor changes can create a big impact. At one client hospital, clinical staff weren’t completing a required piece of documentation. In her observation, Ericka noticed that the sentence with the word “required” was at the bottom of the document. She suggested they move it to the top, within the eyeline of the clinicians.

“Compliance instantly changed because of it,” says Carter. “We went from 65% to nearly 95% compliance just by moving a line of text.”

Carter’s observation-to-implementation process foregrounds the humans working in the hospital. Beyond the immediate workflow improvements, organizations see improved interdisciplinary collaboration, reduced response times, and decreased communication errors. Most importantly, staff report feeling less overwhelmed and more confident they’re receiving the right information at the right time.

Remember: culture change must come from inside. If frontline staff aren’t heard and embedded in the process, your new technology won’t be successful. “Clinicans want to be clinicians,” Carter says, “They don’t want to have to be tech savvy. They just want to do their jobs.”

And for all of them, that job comes down to one thing: keeping patients safe.

The post Human-First Healthcare Support: Observe, Report, Adapt appeared first on Connexall.

Human-First Healthcare Support: Moving Beyond Automation

Antonio Carvalho — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 14:00:47 +0000

To read: ~ 4 minutes

When a hospital’s alarm system fails at 2 AM, the last thing nurses need is to navigate through automated phone menus for 30 minutes before reaching human help. Yet this is exactly the service that most healthcare technology vendors provide in critical situations.

In the post-COVID era, we adapted to the new reality-virtual instead of in-person, remote rather than connected. But the “new normal” has become an imposition: instead of healthcare vendors continuing to respond and adapt to emergency situations, the assumption is that human interaction in technical support can be eliminated.

Even with sophisticated and AI-assisted communication tools, direct human contact remains critical for emergency situations and complex problem-solving. Sofia Arruda, Quality Management System Support Specialist at Connexall, finds the shift troubling: “Nowadays we talk about technologies and AI, but in healthcare support I think customers really want to talk to a person.”

A growing decrease in person-to-person contact adds to the disconnect that’s been the norm in healthcare technology for years.

The Failure of Automation-First Technology Support Models

Healthcare technology vendors tend to approach implementations with a narrow technical focus, missing the reality of healthcare environments.

Most vendors:

Underestimate the challenge of integrating with 200+ different systems, each requiring their own kind of troubleshooting
Fail to account for the vast differences in technological maturity across healthcare organizations (some customers only use a portion of specialized features; others need custom solutions)
Misunderstand integration complexity, where each connection requires multiple additional functionalities

Perhaps due to pressure to move fast and triage large volumes of calls, many vendors put undue reliance on tiered bot-to-human escalation systems, forcing customers through complex automated menus before reaching live support.

“People still call us and get a live person,” says Bruno Rodrigues, Team Lead of Technical Support and Customer Experience at Connexall. “They don’t get a bot and try to navigate with answers and questions until they finally get an option after half an hour to speak to an operator.”

It’s no surprise, then, that these bot-to-human approaches fail in a healthcare environment (where the stakes are literally life or death) and integration problems involve multiple systems, from iPhones and Android devices to legacy pagers. When time is critical, these kinds of self-service options tend to leave customers isolated, rather than supported.

Adaptive, Context-Aware Technology Implementation

While traditional technology support operates from a distance-teams troubleshooting systems they’ve never seen in environments they don’t understand-Connexall uses a fundamentally different approach.

They begin with an understanding of the physical, human, and operational contexts where technology actually lives, to provide adaptive and context-aware support. In their work with healthcare organizations, Sofia and Bruno have come to recognize that healthcare technology succeeds or fails based on real-world conditions, not just technical specifications.

From this understanding they’ve developed a strategic framework to help other technology teams re-prioritize the human on both sides of the support experience.

Build institutional knowledge first

Breakthrough insight: support teams need firsthand healthcare experience.

Most support teams assume technology problems are purely digital. But physical environments, workflows, and the human reality behind the alerts the support team is troubleshooting provide invaluable context for support staff.

“We promote supporting members to go on site with the implementation team,” says Arruda. “Otherwise they know the customer system, but they don’t know how it functions.”

The difference between knowing software features and understanding how those features serve actual patient care can transform implementation from a generic/faceless deployment to something much more customized and optimized for the people in the facility they’re supporting.

Adapt technology, don’t impose it

Breakthrough insight: technology adoption should follow existing communication patterns

Rather than forcing wholesale technology changes, Connexall support adapts to existing communication patterns while gradually introducing improvements. “It’s in our line of business to make information easier to access,” says Bruno. That’s why the Connexall support team followed the lead of hospitals and staff who got used to video sessions instead of phone calls with support during COVID.

Now support calls that involve voice, video, and screensharing are common. Often outnumbering standard phone calls 2 to 1.

Proactive prevention, not reactive fixing

Breakthrough Insight: the best support ticket is the one that never gets created.

“If we identify that a customer has a particular problem,” says Rodrigues, “instead of waiting for others to come in with the same issue, we try to be proactive and take the necessary measures to prevent it from happening.” For Connexall support, that typically means getting someone on the technical team to update the software to prevent repeat problems.

This strategic shift allows the team to anticipate issues based on environmental understanding and then prevent them with targeted software updates and workflow adjustments, transforming support from a reactive cost center to a proactive strategic partner.

How a Human-First Strategy Transforms Healthcare Support

While traditional support models wait for customers to report issues, creating downtime and frustration, Connexall’s system represents a paradigm shift: automated system monitoring that identifies problems before customers experience them.

Sofia Arruda explains this breakthrough: “The system is prepared to send us a ticket, alerting us to something that’s not working.” The Connexall team then goes into the communication system to see what isn’t functioning properly and why and alert their customer to the problem. “Sometimes the customer isn’t even aware there’s an issue going on,” says Arruda.

Though the Connexall team prioritizes human interaction, they are also actively exploring AI and the improved search technologies that exist to help surface knowledge faster. The key, according to the Connexall support team, is using the technology to strengthen human support rather than replace it.

Core Tenets for Adaptive Healthcare Support

If you’re considering ways to improve your own support team’s approach to troubleshooting, keep these core principles in mind:

Maintain dedicated human support channels for critical issues while using automation for routine matters.
Establish clear communication protocols that keep healthcare staff informed throughout resolution, building trust even when problems are complex
Build genuine understanding of clinical workflows through direct observation and immersion in healthcare environments
Deploy automated monitoring that alerts human technicians who can intervene before issues impact patient care
Recognize varying technological readiness across healthcare organizations and tailor approaches accordingly

The future of healthcare technology support isn’t about choosing between human expertise and technological innovation-it’s about combining both to create partnerships that prevent problems rather than just solve them.

In a hospital environment, that difference can be measured not just in uptime and efficiency, but in the resulting quality of patient care itself.

The post Human-First Healthcare Support: Moving Beyond Automation appeared first on Connexall.

Precision Under Pressure: How Our Technical Support Team Delivers in Critical Moments

Antonio Carvalho — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 13:00:22 +0000

To read: ~ 6 minutes

Many hospitals have complex technology integrations with 200+ interconnected systems: which means that everything from pagers, mobile devices, networks and operating systems could be at play in any given communication problem.

With limited visibility into where problems originate, technical teams in healthcare environments are faced with an ongoing challenge: if every support issue is “urgent,” how do they prioritize the problems that demand immediate attention?

Add the constant pressure to resolve issues at top speed, maintain “24/7” availability, and do it all in an environment where communication systems directly impact patient care workflows—and you get a sense of the enormous strain on today’s healthcare tech experts.

80% of high-severity issues originate in other third-party systems, according to Connexall technical experts, adding even more complexity to potential remediations.

Structured Prioritization Framework with Proactive Monitoring

Bruno Rodrigues, Team Lead of Technical Support and Customer Experience at Connexall, and Sofia Arruda, Connexall Quality Management System Support Specialist, have developed a set of defined processes to help their technical teams delineate urgent from non-urgent incident tickets. By establishing a clear prioritization framework, they can properly allocate resources while ensuring critical issues receive immediate attention.

This system consists of a multi-tiered severity classification outline combined with proactive system monitoring.

By enabling technical support teams to identify patterns across the healthcare organization, you can prevent issues before they affect clinical workflows. And, like everything else Connexall does, this comprehensive approach prioritizes human expertise: combining automated system health checking with smart human intervention.

The Incident Management Framework

Step 1: Establish Clear Severity Definitions

“Priority One or Two are what we consider high-severity issues,” says Rodrigues. “Priority one is a complete outage: the system is completely down, nothing is functioning, or the server went into failure mode.” This kind of specific criteria is key to developing severity definitions.

As you think through each “level” of urgency, create definitions using specific criteria that all team members understand. Example severity levels:

Priority 1: Complete system outage affecting the entire facility
Priority 2: Partial outage affecting specific units or device groups
Priority 3: Moderate issue affecting non-critical functions
Priority 4: Minor issue or planned maintenance needs

Once you’ve established severity levels, align response time expectations accordingly:

Priority 1: 24 hours
Priority 2: 48 hours
Priority 3: 5 days
Priority 4: 15 days

Clear timelines and definitions are key when managing customer expectations and ensuring your support team is focused on resolving high priority issues—those that may have a direct impact on patient care. Even if customers would rather not wait five days, knowing there’s a “due date” for non-critical issues will soothe impatience. You’ll also be better equipped to assign tasks when everyone understands delivery expectations.

Step 2: Implement Proper Intake Channels

For every severity level, Rodrigues recommends instituting clear communication channels. Connexall customers know that for high-severity situations the recommendation is to call the support line and get a live person to talk to for help. This dedicated emergency channel helps both customer and support teams prioritize efficiently.

In addition to creating a dedicated emergency channel for high-severity issues, you can streamline support by:

Establishing intake processes that gather essential information immediately. Consider what you need to know to assign a severity level to any given problem. Are patients at risk? Have critical functions been impacted? How long before an “issue” becomes a “crisis?”

Enabling direct access to support personnel for urgent situations without queues. Don’t let callers get stuck in support call limbo. Urgent needs require immediate assistance. Build systems to accommodate this.

Training customers on which channel to use based on issue severity. Spread the word and host virtual and in-person training on how best to access help. When the Connexall project team completes an implementation and hands it off to support, they make sure the transition is smooth and the customer is prepared to access support if and when they need it.

Step 3: Deploy Multi-Level Notification and Escalation Protocols

When dealing with a priority one issue, the Connexall technical team sends two mandatory notifications:

One to the customer, letting them know they’re dealing with a high-severity issue, and an internal notification, alerting team leads to the ongoing problem.

Our structured process ensures high-severity issues are on everyone’s radar and promptly triaged. The support team should define escalation paths based on technical complexity and ensure clear documentation that indicates who is accountable at each stage.

Transparency is a key piece of successful troubleshooting, so Arruda recommends maintaining consistent communication with stakeholders through the resolution process, providing clear and regular updates even when still “in progress.”

Follow Up: Conduct Root Cause Analysis and Documentation

The first priority for any support team is providing a timely resolution and restoring system function. Once that’s complete, it’s vital to understand what caused the system disruption. Start by conducting a root cause analysis that clearly answers:

What was the presenting issue?
What steps were taken to troubleshoot?
What was the final fix/solution?

Perform thorough testing to validate your resolution. Did it solve the root cause, or was it a temporary-fix?

Consolidate progress by:

Documenting your detailed root-cause analysis for knowledge sharing. Consider creating searchable knowledge-base entries for similar future incidents.
Sharing prevention strategies with both internal teams and customers. No better way to build trust than by proving to customers you’ve “been there, done that” when it comes to troubleshooting technical issues.
Tracking patterns to identify systemic issues across your customer base. Adopt a proactive rather than reactive stance.

Demonstrable Improvement in System Reliability and Customer Satisfaction

For the Connexall support team, the best measure of success is the level of satisfaction they’ve built with customer healthcare organizations. “One of our goals,” says Arruda, “is to have satisfaction scores between 8 and 10 out of 10 on at least 92% of our evaluated tickets.”

For the past two years, they’ve achieved 9. 5 and 9.6 ratings across their customer base.

They credit their 90%+ customer satisfaction rates to two core tenets:

Proactive Issue Identification:
The Connexall team’s goal is to identify issues before they arise, improving healthcare staff workflows across the board. Because of this focus, the Connexall system rarely goes down due to an issue on the Connexall side. Their team understands that keeping the system up and running—and at optimal performance—has a positive downstream impact on clinical workflows.
This proactive approach means addressing issues before they affect user-facing applications and workflows, all while demonstrating system reliability through constant monitoring.
Improved Root Cause Accuracy:
By establishing clear separation of issues based on source (Connexall vs. third-party systems), the support team can more accurately troubleshoot problems. Through systematic categorization, they reach solutions faster and better allocate technical resources for those demanding immediate attention.

An Ecosystem of Proactive Support

Healthcare communication systems are too critical to approach every problem “as it arises.” In the same way that clinicians have been trained to step back and create a plan—even in the midst of a crisis—the same should be true for the technical support staff and systems that keep healthcare communications up and running. We must treat the disease, not the symptoms.

By implementing an incident management plan with a structured triage framework, clear trouble ticket escalation protocols, and proactive monitoring, technical teams can transform from reactive and under pressure, to proactive and ready to answer any call.

The result: improved system reliability, enhanced customer satisfaction, and most importantly, better outcomes for patients and providers alike.

The post Precision Under Pressure: How Our Technical Support Team Delivers in Critical Moments appeared first on Connexall.

The C.L.I.N.I.C.A.L. Framework: How to Transform Your Healthcare Technology Implementation

Antonio Carvalho — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 13:00:32 +0000

To read: ~ 6 minutes

Two people are standing on the edge of a riverbank. They see a struggling swimmer floating past, calling for help. They pull the swimmer to safety, but as soon as they do: another floats by. Then another, and another. Finally, one of the original pair goes running up the riverbank.

“Hey!” Their friend shouts after, “Where are you going?”

The runner calls over their shoulder, “I’m going to find out what’s making all these people fall in the river!”

Poor healthcare tech implementation can be a lot like this…

The drowning swimmers: the alarm fatigue that has taken over your clinical staff.

The root cause: an alarm management system that fails to address the clinical workflows that impact nearly everything downstream.

The cost of this disconnect is staggering. Recent research has shown a typical patient on telemetry in a Med Surg unit can generate more than 90 alarms per day, most of which do not require action. It’s a wall of sound, and it’s eating away at the sanity of your staff and safety of your patients.

As a clinical or technical leader in healthcare, you understand the frustration when technology implementations fail to deliver their promised value. These almost-solutions churn the water, without impacting root causes. Despite significant investments in alarm management and clinical communication systems, many organizations continue to struggle with alarm fatigue, poor adoption, and limited return on investment.

But the problem isn’t in the technology itself—it’s in how we implement it.

The False Promise of Technology-Led Solutions

According to Shane Wilson, Productization Specialist at Connexall, most healthcare organizations make a similar series of mistakes when implementing alarm management systems. Too often they:

Make Technology King. Hospital leaders make broad decisions about what technology to deploy in their institution. At the level of decision-making, they sometimes forget to consider the needs of IT and clinical teams, equally. It can be a bit of tightrope: balancing the harmony of the overall tech stack (integration and coherence) with the functionality of those technologies (functionality and ease) for clinicians. If either side gets forgotten, things can quickly go awry.
Think One-Size-Fits All. Clinicians understand that you can’t just apply a workflow in one location to another and expect good results. There are benefits to standardization, but take the time to review and consider those standards first. Allow for unit nuances like staffing patterns, patient populations and the layout of the physical setting to influence configurations. Then, identify barriers to adopting the standard before applying it hospital-wide.
Wait to Include Key Players. Clinical leaders are accountable for the clinical adoption of technology, so bring them in as thought-leaders and champions as early as possible. Too many organizations roll out new systems without this critical input, “and then, three weeks later there’s a riot,” quips Wilson, “because nurses don’t want to use it.”

“Customers may purchase Connexall thinking they can just deploy it ‘out of the box,’” says Wilson, “and it will solve all their problems. But that isn’t the case.” A lot of work still needs to be done.

When an alarm management system is deployed without input from clinical teams, the default (from an abundance of caution/risk aversion) is to “send too many alarms,” and often with a very aggressive (and short) escalation path. So instead of reducing noise in the hospital, it can be doubled or even tripled.

This overabundance of alerts increases alarm fatigue, forces clinical staff to create workarounds, and worst of all: fails to improve patient safety.

A Better Way: Clinical First Technology Implementation

The information you need to make smart implementation decisions doesn’t exist within the technical specifications or a product manual. It exists on the hospital floor, and in the experience of the people who work there.

It’s why a huge part of the Connexall Clinical Elevate program includes direct, on-site observation at every client hospital.

As Wilson says: “The clinician should have a say in every circumstance where it touches their clinical workflow and patient safety. The tech folks are there to provide the tools.” Ideally the process is a collaborative one, with both perspectives at the table.

Through this on-site engagement—combined with Connexall’s 30+ years of implementation experience—we’ve developed a set of best practices for those forward-thinking leaders looking to design a clinical-first implementation.

The C.L.I.N.I.C.A.L. Approach: Foundations for Successful Healthcare Technology Implementation

The following C.L.I.N.I.C.A.L. Approach provides a structured, evidence-based approach to implementing clinical technology solutions that deliver lasting value. This methodology has helped organizations achieve remarkable results, including up to 43% reduction in alarm volumes while improving response to critical alerts.

Whether you’re planning a new implementation or struggling with an existing one, these strategies will help you bridge the technical-clinical divide and create sustainable value from your technology investments.

C.L.I.N.I.C.A.L. Approach for Clinical-First Technology Implementation

Clinical

Healthcare technology implementations must prioritize clinical excellence and patient-centered care above all else. The technology should enhance, not disrupt, the delivery of high-quality care and patient outcomes.

Hospitals should evaluate every workflow decision through the lens of its impact on clinicians and the patients they care for.

Clinical Checklist:

✅ Prioritize patient safety alongside technical functionality

✅ Prepare to design workflows around real clinical environments

✅ Plan to measure success through clinical outcomes

Leadership

Technology implementations that affect clinical workflows must be led by the clinical leaders who have the authority to drive change and spearhead adoption. Their expertise in navigating patient alerts “on the ground” will make a decisive difference in your implementation design.

Wilson strongly encourages the formation of an ongoing Alarm Management Committee, with the support of our Connexall Clinical Elevate program, as the most effective means for managing clinical alarms and workflows moving forward.

Leadership Checklist:

✅Establish clinical leadership authority

✅Engage nursing leaders with power to influence

✅Ensure clinicians have the final say in workflow decisions

Inclusion

When you start planning a new technological system with IT, include clinical leaders in the technology conversation as early as possible. They will be especially helpful in alarm management decisions.

Clinical leaders may want to see a small pilot before rolling out a new tech system across all care units, especially for alarm management. Connexall client hospitals, such as Stanford and Avera, have both benefited from a phased rollout of new alarm notifications. They started by sending only a few critical alarms and key alerts, and found that once clinicians got acquainted with the system, they were quick to request additional alarms and alerts. The wider rollout was therefore much easier.

Inclusion Checklist:

✅ Begin with recommendations from clinical teams

✅ Engage IT to design a system that works within the existing hospital workflows

✅ Expand based on clinical request and evidence-based feedback

Network

Clinical leaders need ongoing input from frontline staff and vendor partners to understand how technology and workflows are actually performing at the bedside. Without these information networks, leaders often make decisions based on incomplete data or assumptions that don’t reflect the reality of the units.

Successful hospitals build regular feedback mechanisms that connect a network of multiple information sources. This means conducting routine staff surveys about workflow challenges, analyzing patient safety, and maintaining direct communication with technology vendors about system performance. Clinical leaders should speak with their networks regularly to understand how workflows function in practice, not just how they’re supposed to work on paper.

Network Checklist:

✅ Implement systematic feedback collection from frontline staff

✅ Establish ongoing communication protocols with healthcare technology partners

✅ Create feedback loops in the network to strategize on improving patient care

Improvement

Just as important as onsite observation during the Connexall Clinical Elevate program is the ongoing improvement through data collection, analysis, and review. This should happen before, during, and after implementation.

To create effective alarm management, you need to collect data and collaborate on a system of improvement. If you don’t track data for alarms, says Wilson, “How will you be able to make any kind of alarm management decision?”

Improvement Checklist:

✅ Implement data-driven oversight

✅ Establish ongoing alarm committees

✅ Review effectiveness metrics regularly

Collaboration

A key element of Connexall’s Clinical Elevate program is helping our client hospitals establish a functioning Alarm Management Committee. This cross-disciplinary group of internal stakeholders continues the oversight, review, and data collection long after the 12-month Clinical Elevate engagement ends.

When building these committees, we consciously include both IT and clinical leads. In fact, Wilson encourages the inclusion of a diversity of voices, from across the hospital, to create a culture of shared responsibility when it comes to alarm management.

Collaboration Checklist:

✅ Bridge the clinical-technical divide

✅ Foster communication between IT and clinical staff

✅ Create high-functioning collaborative implementation teams

Alignment

Leaders of successful implementations align teams around a shared vision and goal, breaking down silos and competing agendas.

Informatics, at its core, is about harmonizing technology, people, and processes. Doing this effectively drives both innovation and adoption. Establishing an Alarm Management Committee is one way to achieve this alignment, as it brings together a cross-functional team with a common objective: improve workflow efficiency and patient safety.

By establishing standardized practices in this setting, you can create a system that operates consistently. The shift in thinking from “let’s send every alarm” to “let’s take time to figure out which alarms make sense to send” increases trust, reduces alerts, and speeds up critical response.

Alignment Checklist:

✅ Establish a shared vision and goal

✅ Focus on providing value to clinicians and patients

✅ Build alarm management solutions that solve actual workflow problems

Learning

Embrace continuous learning as a catalyst for clinical excellence. With a growth mindset at the core, you can use digital tools and data-driven strategies to empower teams to learn, adapt, and elevate outcomes in an ever-evolving healthcare landscape.

Wilson notes that hospitals that approached alarm management with a growth mindset are enjoying the benefits years later. Their ongoing commitment to learning and adaptation allows their systems to evolve with the times.

Learning Checklist:

✅ Establish a culture of continuous learning

✅ Adapt systems as organizational needs evolve

✅ Proactively communicate with staff about expected workflow changes

Transformation: From Departmental Silos to Organizational Partnership

The C.L.I.N.I.C.A.L. Approach is transforming how healthcare organizations think about the relationship between technology and clinical practice, and helping leaders like you address the upstream source of alarm fatigue rather than just treating the symptoms.

It represents a fundamental transformation in organizational thinking about technology adoption:

From IT-Centered to Operationally Led and IT-Enabled:

When clinical leaders play a key role in technology decisions, the conversation shifts from technical specifications to patient care priorities.

From Alarm Repetition to Intelligent Filtering:

Leading organizations recognize that true safety comes from meaningful, actionable communication—not from sending every possible alert “just to be safe.”

From One-Time Setup to Continuous Evolution:

Implementation becomes an ongoing clinical practice rather than a project with an end-date, with regular review cycles that keep systems aligned with evolving needs.

From Resistance to Pull:

Success is achieved when clinicians begin requesting more capabilities rather than resisting the technology—a start-small, “pull” model where staff actively seek to expand the system’s role..

As you consider your own clinical technology implementations, ask yourself: Are you focused on the swimmers, struggling in the river, or are you ready to engage the clinical leaders in your organization and take the journey upstream? To solve alarm fatigue at the source. Together.

The post The C.L.I.N.I.C.A.L. Framework: How to Transform Your Healthcare Technology Implementation appeared first on Connexall.

From Vendor to Partner: a New Model for Healthcare Technology Success

Antonio Carvalho — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 13:00:31 +0000

To read: ~ 3 minutes

The Critical Gap in Healthcare Technology Implementation

Vendors come in like cowboys, drop software, and with a tip of their hat: they’re gone. Meanwhile, clinical teams are left to wrangle a technology that may or may not fit into their workflows. Adoption is a game of “cross your fingers and hope for the best.”

And the rift between technical and clinical teams widens.

All because there is a glaring misunderstanding at play: You can implement technology at a hospital the same way you would at a corporation.

Jan Capps, Director of Clinical Services and Outcomes at Connexall, saw this disconnect as she was building the Clinical Elevate program. “We didn’t have processes that really aligned with best practices around clinical adoption.”

As an advanced practice nurse herself, Jan could see that the traditional implementation model wasn’t the right fit.

Throwing Away the Old Playbook

Hospitals are uniquely complex environments with intricately connected systems. The needs of the clinical staff vary wildly from department to department, and the stakes are, quite literally, life and death.

If you walk into a clinical environment with a technical-first approach and a canned set of project metrics—you’re going to miss the mark. Even if your software has proven value.

In the old way, implementation teams would:

Take a technical-first approach – prioritizing system installation, configuration, and functionality over clinical workflows and user adoption (aka, the cowboy way).

Vanish after implementation – paying little attention to whether the technology was (or wasn’t) adopted by clinical staff.

Forget the downstream effects on patients – focusing instead on scope and timeline as the only measures of success.

Maintain silos – with limited coordination between clinical and technical teams, ultimately setting themselves up for failure.

In the end, the efficacy of the software didn’t matter nearly as much as the real-world impact. Clinical staff, nurses in particular, are often slow to adopt change. To serve patients they need predictable outcomes, and standards of practice they can trust. Without their buy-in, your “transformative” software is doomed before first login.

Inside Clinical Elevate’s Methodology: a Blueprint for Lasting Change

There is no quick-fix solution to alarm management. Layering technology on top of teams that have developed their own workarounds to manage alarm fatigue is a bit like trying to shower a cat. You might get it wet, but it’s not going to like it – and will avoid a repeat performance at all costs.

That’s why Jan and her team began by shifting how they saw success. They would focus on sustainable clinical outcomes rather than traditional project metrics.

Is this technology having a positive clinical impact?
Does this technology fit into staff workflows? Is there widespread utilization, or is it siloed within technical teams?
Is this adoption sustainable, or are users dropping out once the novelty of new tech has
worn off?
Has the team implementing this technology spent the necessary time inside the clinical environment so that they deeply understand the needs of the clinical staff?

The 100 over 12 rule

To make lasting change, says Jan, “You’ve got to spend about eighty-five to 100 hours over the course of twelve months.”

By starting with these questions, the Clinical Elevate team was able to develop a comprehensive 12-month program with clear phases, deliverables and accountability measures. This kind of sound clinical implementation includes:

Clinical-first focus during implementation, led by a team of clinical experts. Jan’s team all have BSN or higher degrees and are skilled informaticists, who understand both healthcare workflows and technology integration. (Their entire team is also trained on Human Factors Engineering – a fancy way of saying ‘make sure things are the right size and easy to use for the people who need them.’)

Stakeholder engagement with an emphasis on empowering clinical leadership from the beginning. Finding a champion in the form of a nursing leader with power to influence at the strategic level is imperative.

Direct observation on site, by the clinical team. They should take into account the ergonomics, layout of the facility, and any other human factors that might impact adoption.

An evidence-based approach to determine best practices. The clinical team should spend the time necessary to do their due diligence, using recent scientific literature as a baseline for strategic decisions.

One Giant Step into the Future of Healthcare Tech

Shifting to this “new way” may involve the killing of some darlings—technical and clinical teams alike tend to get stuck in old habits—but the results are undeniable.

The large upfront investment of time and the on-the-ground partnership creates a self-sustaining system. Hospital teams are able to manage ongoing process improvement, once the implementation has ended.
When the team that’s implementing the software has a clinical background and knows what it’s like to operate at top speed—and with the high stakes of patient safety—they can make technical choices that support that work rather than stand at odds with it.
In this new paradigm, technology implementation is no longer the wild west. By using clinical outcomes as the hallmarks of success, you can develop a measurable framework to track hospital-wide impact.

Because of this, the Clinical Elevate approach is more like a clinical transformation initiative than a simple technical project. Healthcare provider Novant Health achieved a 43% reduction in alarms across twelve sites with Clinical Elevate by addressing workflow, configuration, education and communication issues rather than just technical deployment.

Partnership in Practice

“As a leader,” Jan says, “my job is to give you strategic direction, remove barriers, and empower you with the right tools.” She and her team believe in trust through transparency. The goal shouldn’t be recurring revenue, it should be successful, sound, adoption.

Anyone who has spent even a part of their career in a clinical setting understands that a hospital environment is constantly evolving. The technology within the hospital ecosystem should be evidence-based, human-focused, and able to grow and adapt as the organization grows.

If you’re looking for a partner in alarm management and workflow transformation, you can learn more about Clinical Elevate’s process and successes here.

The post From Vendor to Partner: a New Model for Healthcare Technology Success appeared first on Connexall.