What do hospitals use MultiBel for?

Hospitals are under all circumstances responsible for providing responsible care to patients, especially during crises. To be able to provide this continuous care, there are many plans within hospitals, such as the hospital crisis plan.

Almost half of all Dutch hospitals rely on MultiBel as a hospital notification system to send emergency alerts to internal and external staff in case of calamities. Research by the EW Weekblad (article “Hospitals are vulnerable to fire, IT failure and violence” on March 8, 2022) has shown that the risk of incidents increases at hospitals. Dutch hospitals are well prepared for disasters, but often much less for internal calamities. This is where the risks for hospitals lie. In the past 20 years, there have been 143 incidents at Dutch hospitals, as a result of which critical departments had to close their doors.

MultiBel has besides its usage as a healthcare notification system other applications that are implemented at hospitals. Examples are sending emergency alerts to the emergency response team, and sending alert messages in case of technical malfunctions or IT problems. MultiBel can also be used as a silent alarm evacuation system.

Hospital Notification System

With the activation of the hospital notification system within the Crisis Plan, it is important that sufficient doctors, nurses, specialists and other officials are notified quickly and easily. MultiBel alerts tens of thousands of people within a few seconds via an app, in case there is no response, MultiBel calls the people on a maximum of 10 telephone numbers per person, email, SMS and messages to pagers. Until the person confirms or declines the emergency alert. People can give a time indication within how many minutes they are present. This can be followed in real-time by the activator. Different task cards can be displayed so that everyone knows what is expected of them.

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Hospital evacuation system via smartphone

Evacuation of a hospital is a major operation. MultiBel is the first Cloud solution to be used as a certified evacuation system in hospitals in the Netherlands. This removes the obligation to purchase expensive hardware with auxiliary transmitters. All evacuation notifications are received on the smartphone. In addition, there are many other functionalities such as sharing task cards, walkie-talkie app, sending alerts in the event of understaffing, crisis logging, etc.

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Critical Event Management

Our Critical Event Management software is a powerful tool for identifying, analyzing, and responding to incidents that could threaten your people and organization. It goes far beyond simply alerting people. It ensures business continuity and minimizes disruption.

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On-call shifts

MultiBel is often used for calling Emergency Room staff. It is possible to call these persons on the basis of their on-call shifts. As a result only employees on duty are alerted during an emergency. After reading the timetable once, you can easily adjust the services yourself. Employees can also exchange their shifts amongst each other through the MultiBel app.

Connections

MultiBel can easily be linked to surrounding systems. These can be “triggers” such as fire panels, emergency buttons, sensors of for instance cooling installations or monitoring software of the IT networks. The possibilities are almost endless. On the input side, MultiBel is often linked to existing HRM packages such as AFAS or Beaufort.

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Lone worker safety in hospitals

In the hospital there are also people who work alone. Whether they are nurses at night or people from the technical service. In either case, you want to make sure their safety is embroidered. With the MultiBel app you can equip your employees with a lone worker solution, without additional hardware. If for instance someone falls down or there is no movement for too long, an alarm is automatically started.

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Communication via the walkie-talkie app

Within the hospital, our walkie-talkie app is used for various purposes. The crisis team can consult continuously on their own channel. It doesn’t matter if they are on the location or from home. As long as the app is connected to the internet, the walkie-talkie function is available. An evacuation can also be coordinated via the walkie-talkie function. When the hospital emergency response team is called, they can also use the communication options directly in the same app, without having to pick up a traditional walkie-talkie first.

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IT incident

When computer systems within hospitals fail or do not work, this can have major consequences. Many different information flows within the hospital have been digitized. With MultiBel you ensure that in the event of a failure of various systems or ransomware attacks, you can still send emergency notifications, inform and communicate with each other.

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Henri de Wit,
staff officer safety coordinator Emergency Response Team and Hospital Crisis Plan

St. Anna Hospital used bell trees for the introduction of MultiBel in 2002. Because of the labor intensity and error-prone nature, an automated solution was considered. MultiBel was already quite revolutionary in all its basic simplicity, while the old MultiBel offered a lot less in functionality than the current MultiBel.

The St. Anna has recently revised the entire layout of MultiBel and redesigned the MultiBel system. This was largely done on the basis of the organization chart and all scenarios within the Integrated Crisis Plan. The scenarios cover calling the first responders for calamities to a complete Hospital Integral Crisis Plan emergency notification.

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Esther Beeris,
Crisis Management and Integrated Security Advisor

MultiBel is flexible and easy to use. We can make the calls quickly and easily. We are also pleased with the manual. We have no experience with the MultiBel helpdesk, because we never needed it. We can describe the contact with our regular contacts of MultiBel as “thinking along in the right solution for us”.

MultiBel is used for alerting and communication within the Hospital Crisis Plan / Hospital Disaster Relief Plan and for emergency notification and communication of the CERT.

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Mark van Not,
Crisis- & Continuïteitsmanagement

In the first instance, MultiBel is only used for the initial alarms within the Disaster Response Plan. Very specific alarms can be programmed in with simple building blocks.

Because continuity issues arise in daily practice, the need has gradually arisen to deploy MultiBel Alarm more widely. Even as an extension of regular patient care. One spell is central to all MultiBel scenarios: