Case Study

Streamlined Hospital Staffing, Better
Patient Outcomes, and Better Overall Care
– All Made Possible with BlackBerry
U.S. Medical Facility
Industry:
Healthcare
Location:
North America
Product:BlackBerry® AtHoc®

At a Glance
Exceptional patient care is the foundation of everything this community hospitaldoes across its many primary and ancillary departments. Ensuring its daily staffing
operations run as efficiently as possible is critical to this. To help streamline
recruitment and scheduling, the hospital’s resource operations center choseBlackBerry.

A Patient-First Approach
Effective resourcing is at the core of effective healthcare. In a hospital setting, it’smore than a matter of convenience. Directing medical professionals, so they’realways where they’re most needed, is frequently a matter of life and death.
This physician’s hospital understands that fact well. As part of a major network
serving patients and their families across multiple regions, it employs several
hundred clinical staff and several thousand support staff. Above all else, it defines
itself by its approach to its patients.

“One of our pillars of belief is that the patient comes first,” notes a manager atthe hospital. “Everything kind of flows back into that. We don’t want people tohave an experience at any level of our organization where they’re not getting ourabsolute best.”
To that end, all inpatient beds are in private rooms. The hospital maintains a
regularly-reviewed care model centered on positive patient outcomes. And finally,
it prioritizes putting the right personnel in the right place at the right time.
To meet this priority, schedules must be organized and easily accessible, andstaffing gaps must be filled as quickly as possible.
The hospital’s operations center shoulders this complex task, managing nearly
40 departments, which between them offer a wide range of primary and ancillary
services. Each agent in the operations center manages scheduling for several
departments. Leadership understands the importance of efficiency, and regularly
seeks new innovations to better enable these agents.

A Complex Logistical Challenge“Our goal is to post a schedule with as close to no open shifts on it as possible,”says one Lead Resource Specialist. “Ultimately, we consider ourselves successful
only if we can solve staffing issues in such a way as not to impact patient care.”As the central call-in office for all hospital employees, the hospital operations center
manages scheduling and resourcing for inpatient and ancillary facilities, staying inconstant contact with departmental directors. When a schedule is ready, it is posted
first to the hospital’s senior employees per union directive.
From there, processes within the scheduling system post it to the larger employee
base, allowing them to sign up on a first-come, first-served basis. Should a shift
remain unclaimed or need to be filled, the operations center takes the initiative.
First, it calls any personnel that has indicated they are available for an open shift.
If none of those staff are available, it must then reach out to anyone with thenecessary expertise – a painstaking process if done manually, and one of thegreatest potential bottlenecks in the resourcing process.

Seeking a Better Communications Platform
The hospital’s existing alerting system was less than ideal. Messages took too longto compose, and there was far too much manual work whenever an alert had to besent out. The operations center recognized that they were spending too much timeon tasks that would be better off automated.
The final sign that something needed to change came during a recent emergency
at the hospital. During the crisis, the operations center attempted to use its alerting
system to notify employees of the threat. Unfortunately, since people were unable toopt out of receiving notifications from the platform, many configured their devices toignore the alerts, and the operations center had no way of knowing who was notified.

“When we compareBlackBerry AtHocto the processes
that we had withour previoussystem, I cansit down andcomplete threeor more alerts inthe time it would
have taken me todo one. And one
template withinBlackBerry AtHoc
can replace overan hour’s worthof manual calls.
We’re sending out
multiple templates
each day, so we’reseeing huge timesavings acrossthe board.”- Lead Resource Specialist

Decision-makers at the hospital set out to replace their existing alerting system,seeking a solution that met several core requirements.

BlackBerryCase Study: U.S. Medical Facility | 2

First, a new solution would need to integrate seamlessly with the hospital’s existing
human resources system. Otherwise, operations center staff would have to manually
update their listings every time a clinician moved to a different department orchanged their job title. Even in a small facility, this would not be feasible.
“In a hospital, people move throughout the organization constantly,” notes theManager of the Patient Care Operations Center. “In order for us to be efficient andnot have to manually change our list every single day, establishing a feed between
our alerting system and our HR system was absolutely critical.”
The hospital also needed the capacity to directly target certain individuals orgroups based on a wide range of criteria, including job title, skills, education,and expertise. For instance, a pediatrician typically might not be contacted tofill a shift in an inpatient pharmacy – unless said pediatrician also possessed apharmacological degree. The operations center needed a way to identify theseoutliers for recruitment purposes.
Finally, decision-makers sought a solution that would cut down on the time required
to send out notifications, whether pertaining to an open shift or an emergency
scenario. After evaluating its options, the hospital chose AtHoc Alert.

More Efficient Alerting and Scheduling
Each workstation in the hospital’s operations center now supports two monitors,
one displaying the scheduling system and the other displaying BlackBerry AtHoc.
Both systems receive a feed from the hospital’s human resources system that keeps
them up-to-date with names, contact information, titles, and all other pertinent
data. This allows unit schedulers to see at a glance anyone capable of covering aparticular shift.
The hospital can now draw on an extensive set of pre-built templates that organize
staff based on departments, hierarchy, and individual skills and specialties. This
allows targeted alerts to be generated in a matter of minutes. All a scheduler has
to do is enter some basic information, and ensure a message is not being sent toanyone marked as unavailable.
“We have templates set up in BlackBerry AtHoc for just about every departmentin the facility, and well-documented call-in procedures,” explains the Manager of
the Patient Care Operations Center. “If, for example, an employee is calling in fromradiology, we know the appropriate steps to take and the appropriate templates toaccess. We also use BlackBerry AtHoc for proactive resourcing to help staff critical
departments such as the Emergency Room.”“We wereinitially drawn toBlackBerry AtHoc
because we knew
BlackBerry had anestablished history
within healthcareand government.
Given ourperformance andreliability issues
with our previous
solutions, we didn’t
want to expend any
time and effort on
a company that
didn’t have someexperience.”- Lead Resource Specialist

BlackBerry AtHoc’s multi-channel functionality has also proved valuable to unit
schedulers, who now have several options for sending out notifications to hospital
staff. The hospital can reach out via home phone, mobile phone, email, and text
message. It has also created distribution lists for mass casualty events, enabling
it to quickly bring more physicians to the facility as required.

BlackBerryCase Study: U.S. Medical Facility | 3

Staffing aside, the hospital plans to use BlackBerry AtHoc for emergency alerting
based on parameters provided by its emergency management director. The
platform’s logging functionality allows the operations center to meet information
requests from its two unions quickly. It’s also proven useful for notifying staff ofvisits from regulatory agencies and governmental bodies.
Finally, BlackBerry AtHoc allows the operations center to work more effectively withstaff unions to establish specific protocols around seniority and overtime. There
are fewer grievances about shifts being awarded to staff that don’t follow union
guidelines. More importantly, all shift-related disputes are documented and easily
auditable through the platform.

Better Flow, Better Outcomes
It can take nearly an hour to fill a shift manually – sometimes longer. With BlackBerry
AtHoc, that process is cut down to a matter of minutes. The hospital’s operations
center can immediately take action when a shift needs to be filled, sending out
targeted alerts to all staff capable of filling it.
The hospital is also using BlackBerry AtHoc to extend its reach. Its previous alerting
system was unable to contact any of the hospital’s international staff, which
comprise a large percentage of its employee base. This enables the operations
center to easily fill jobs that were once incredibly difficult to fill.
“Ultimately, our greatest measure of success is being able to fill open slots before
those openings result in service or patient care interruptions,” explains the hospitalmanager. “BlackBerry AtHoc allows us to achieve that. It helps us stick to our patientcare model, and ensure patients receive the quality of care they deserve.”

About BlackBerryBlackBerry (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) provides intelligent security software and services to enterprises andgovernments around the world. The company secures more than 500M endpoints including 150M carson the road today. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the company leverages AI and machine learning to deliver
innovative solutions in the areas of cybersecurity, safety and data privacy solutions, and is a leader in
the areas of endpoint security management, encryption, and embedded systems. BlackBerry’s vision isclear — to secure a connected future you can trust.

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