Talking HealthTech: 315 – Hospitals; don’t be alarmed! David Paré, Olinqua

Podcast Home >

[embedded content]

Notifications – we get a lot of them. They can be really handy in bringing something important to our attention. But with more and more devices and apps and systems that are calling for our attention, it can get noisy, confusing and overwhelming – which defeats the whole purpose of notifications in the first place, doesn’t it?

This is absolutely the case in our day-to-day lives in business and personal – but also very much the case in healthcare. 

Well, in this episode, Pete speaks with David Pare from Olinqua. They discuss operational workflows in hospitals, alarm fatigue in healthcare, the importance of integrations and partnerships amongst healthcare technology and a lot more too

Meet David Pare

David Pare is the Chief Technology Officer at Olinqua, a company that is helping hospitals to optimise their workforce, healthcare and patient outcomes with unified communications, location and mobility solutions. Before joining the Olinqua family, David was the CTO for Healthcare and Life Sciences for DXC- ANZ for about five years. 

When DXC sold their healthcare business to a European company, he ran a software team of about three hundred people with twenty products across fifteen countries. 

Update on Olinqua

Over the past few months, Olinqua has been growing, and within ten months, the company now has fifty team members. Olinqua is also doubling its efforts in creating an improved product with more features to better serve its customers. The company has a platform that has been in the market for just about ten years, and it is now looking to scale into the US and other markets. Olinqua has made its name solving issues for hospitals in regards to the integration and management of alarms with its very sophisticated market leading platform and is now expanding into other areas like task management, communication & collaboration and more.

The State of Hospital Notifications

The number of notifications that healthcare staff encounter daily is quite numerous. In fact, a recently published report detailed that for a hospital in the US and another in Australia, the staff can get between seventy and a hundred alarms per day per patient. There are two types of alarms; clinical, which includes things like the EKG monitor. Then there are operational notifications, which are things like the fire panel, the nurse call light and helipad alarms.  

The issue is there are a plethora of systems, and there are more and more of them in the future. As such, hospitals end up with a number of different systems that are not integrated. This means healthcare professionals may get an alert or an SMS from one app and other alerts from other apps or a pager. Furthermore, existing solutions mostly provide very simple approaches to deal with these alarms with little to no workflows.

Therefore, it’s quite difficult for operational staff members to understand where to go, where to look and what to do because they are all very manual and they are all very siloed across the different systems. 

Olinqua’s Role in Integration 

Part of the brand’s claim to fame is alarm integration and management. A lot of the competitors actually have a play of closed ecosystems, but no one does everything, and that means the various systems will need to communicate at some point. Olinqua works with everyone, and as such, they come in and take care of the ‘hard stuff’- the integration of everything operational in the backend. 

Olinqua talks the old, crappy, difficult language of protocols and then integrates all of them, providing a single place for all that data to come in so that they can then trigger the alarms in different channels, such as SMS or an in-app message. The company brokers all this, making it as simple as possible, and they also lower the cost that clients face. 

Plus, once they’ve aggregated all that data, the facility will have a much better view of the operational side of the hospital. 

Making Notifications Meaningful

The basic part is getting the alarm, but what should the staff do with that alert? 

With Olinqua’s duress tag, for example, when a nurse pushes the button, the alarm is interpreted in a system as a code black, which is aggression. This then triggers a workflow for security to act on. It gets interesting because some of these incidents have different codes, such as code blue, which is a medical urgency. In this case, if something happens, there is a medical emergency team that is already configured in a system. When the alert is triggered, members of that team can respond on their phones and rush to the emergency site. 

This allows workflow management of different levels, as an alert can be set for a spill to get the attention of a cleaner or someone to move a patient. Workflow integration is essential to David and Olinqua because the product they’re building is useless if users are not using it. 

Connecting the Bits and Pieces

There are no unique standards today for all these things, but it’s something that is required. So, Olinqua builds its own internal standard and uses adapters to connect all these systems, which are then converted to Olinqua’s own standards, and that’s how they store the data. From there, the clients can trigger what they want based on the workflow they want.

Olinqua hopes to make its standards open source so that others can benefit from them. 

2023 & Beyond for Olinqua 

One of the biggest things they are working on is a role-based directory that allows the alerts for the more sophisticated elements, either a task or an incident or a message, to be role-based. This means the alerts would go specifically to the doctor on call.

Also, Olinqua has roughly one hundred customers in Australia, and most of them are On-premise. Now, the company is starting to see a shift in the cloud. But the company also has contingencies in place just in case there is an interruption in connectivity that affects the cloud. If something happens with the connection to the cloud, it can still connect to your application On-premise, but in a low, smaller and cheaper way. 

Olinqua and Virtual Care 

Olinqua has seen the big push for hospitals in the home, and in these cases, their solutions would function the same as within a brick-and-mortar hospital setting where the systems would be integrated and then the alerts set up for at-home monitoring. 

Another big use case is aged care, particularly since the Royal Commission highlighted so many issues and made recommendations as well. Olinqua also does asset tracking and people tracking. A bit of infrastructure is required, but once that is in place, these new protocols allow the tracking at different levels of accuracy, either people or things.  In the case of healthcare, the sensors can be placed at specific points to determine when someone enters or exits a room. 

Working with Disparate Systems

Integrating disparate systems depends on the complexity or the number of systems to integrate. Olinqua works with other partner companies, so they build the software, and their partners would implement it. But once the infrastructure is in place, the rest of the set-up is not extremely difficult.  What remains is primarily configuration and workshopping. 

When to Contact Olinqua

There is no wrong time to make contact with Olinqua. At any point in your facility’s journey, you can reach out to the company, as they have access to a lot of resources, including those from Microsoft and Apple. 

_{Source talkinghealthtech.com}