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.
