How a Major US Hospital Cut Emergency Wait Times with Orion Voice Bots and Onyx

Inefficient communication at a large hospital system

A large public hospital system has an ongoing organization-wide initiative to identify process improvements and streamline workflows. As part of that initiative, they recently discovered that they were inadvertently creating excessively long wait times for emergency department visits.

Hospital staff and first responders had to follow a long chain of steps to alert hospital staff of incoming patients. Furthermore, they had to rely on a complex combination of radios, phone calls, pagers, and an overhead intercom system.

This chain of communication took three to five minutes for every incoming patient. The hospital system fields over hundreds of thousands of emergency visits per year, leading to thousands of hours of wasted time.

Drastically saving staff and patient time with Orion

The hospital equipped paramedics, trauma teams, and the emergency department’s triage nurse with Onyx, Orion’s lightweight voice badge. Onyx enabled paramedics to speak directly with the triage nurse instead of going through the city’s fire dispatch center and the hospital operator. Also, the triage nurse could alert the right trauma team by real-time voice instead of a phone call or pager alert.

Hospital management decided to use more Orion push-to-talk services: they added an Orion Voice Bot. Some hospital staff needed to keep using their pagers, so the team activated an Orion healthcare Voice Bot to transcribe patient alerts into pager alerts. This automation enabled staff to continue using familiar tools while adding Orion voice bot superpowers. The Voice Bot also sends messages to the hospital archives, creating records for later assessment.

As a result, emergency department doctors have more time to consult with their team and prepare a specific treatment plan for each patient they see. Triage nurses now juggle fewer calls and messages. Implementing Orion Voice Bots and Onyx devices has led to less time spent on logistics and resources, fewer errors, and more time spent with patients. Now, the system’s medical teams don’t need to waste time waiting for critical information and can focus on the essential task of caring for people.

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To learn more about how this major US hospital cut Emergency Department wait times by over 60%, read the complete case study.