U of M Nurses Respond to Patients with Smartphones

MINNEAPOLIS - The nurses at the University of Minnesota Medical Center admit that at first they weren’t crazy about the new devices they got handed about six months ago. “These phones are bigger than most nurses want to carry around,” says Lynn Humann, longtime nurse at the hospital, “but the patient satisfaction’s been huge.”

Now, there’s no way they’d part with them, nor would the patients.

“Sometimes they kind of joke because three people will come in and answer their call!”

The phones use wireless internet technology and integrate with the equipment the hospital already uses. The old method, still in use at many hospitals, is that when a patient pushes their call button, someone at the nurse’s station answers. They then must relay the patients request to their nurse through a pager. It can take up to ten minutes for a nurse to respond to a patient’s request.

Now, when a patient pushes their call button, it directly dials their nurse. They often answer within seconds. If they can’t, someone else will, because the same call goes to two other people.

Linda Benassi, a patient who’s been treated at the U of M Medical Center for several years, says that under the old system of waiting for a nurse to be paged “I would get so annoyed laying in bed thinking when are they going to come in here and help me.” Now, she says, the response is nearly instantaneous.

The point of the new technology is to increase efficiency and patient satisfaction. It’s working so far, says Dr. Amy Jonson, whose heard tons of feedback from patients that they haven’t had to wait nearly as long to get their pain medications. The phones also allow doctors to directly call a nurse, rather than also waiting for them to respond to a message passed through the nursing station.

The U of M Medical Center has 225 of the ASCOM devices in use and are now seriously considering expanding them to other hospitals in the Fairview system.

“I don’t see any downsides” says Dr. Jonson.