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.

Research conducted by EW Magazine in its article “Hospitals are vulnerable to fire, IT failure and violence (8 March 2022) found that the risk of incidents affecting hospitals is increasing. While Dutch hospitals are generally well prepared for major disasters, they are often significantly less prepared for internal emergencies. It is precisely these internal incidents that pose some of the greatest risks. Over the past 20 years, 143 incidents have occurred in Dutch hospitals, resulting in the closure of critical departments.

MultiBel is a versatile safety and emergency communication platform used by nearly half of all Dutch hospitals. It enables rapid, reliable communication in critical situations, supporting staff mobilisation, building evacuation and personal safety alarms in the event of aggression or violence.

 

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.

Hospital Notification System
silent alarm

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.

Personal Safety Alarms with Indoor Positioning

Hospitals are increasingly confronted with incidents involving aggression and violence. Through the emergency button on their care device or smartphone, staff can instantly raise an alarm and request assistance.

What makes our solution unique is its ability to determine the precise indoor location of a person in distress using our AI-Positioning System (AI-PS). Unlike traditional indoor positioning solutions, AI-PS does not require the installation of Bluetooth beacons throughout the building. Instead, it uses the hospital’s existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to accurately locate staff members, enabling a faster and more effective emergency response.

walkie talkie app smartphone
CEM

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.

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.

on-call duty roster hospital
fire alarm button

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.

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.

IT-Security
Anna Zorggroep

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.

meander

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.

St Antonius Hospital

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:

Time savings on alarming promote quality of life.

MultiBel is used for all possible calamities within the hospital crisis plan, both for internal and external calamities. External calamities are often accompanied by a large supply of patients. Here the speed of the emergency alert send by the hospital notification system is of great importance. In case of internal calamities, your own infrastructure can be damaged and fail. It is then crucial that MultiBel runs externally in secure data centers and operates completely separate from the hospital infrastructure.

Jens Beerkens,
Sales Consultant

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Whitepaper hospitals in the Netherlands

Read in our whitepaper how MultiBel is implemented at hospitals in the Netherlands.
Download whitepaper (IN DUTCH)

Sales contact

Contact us for more information or a demo.

    Maikel Wijman,

    Sales Consultant