NTFGH Emergency Response Team Getting to a Patient Within 2.6 Minutes
JurongHealth and Austco Marketing & Service Asia Pte Ltd. formed a strategic partnership when Austco’s Tacera solution was chosen for their new state-of-the-art facility in Singapore. The JurongHealth Campus is comprised of the 700-bed Ng Teng Fong General Hospital (NTFGH) and 400-bed Jurong Community Hospital (JCH). The hospitals were designed and built together from the ground up as an integrated development to complement each other for better patient care, greater efficiency and reduced operational costs. 
The Tacera solution designed for JurongHealth offers a range of features and functionality to help improve patient outcomes, operational workflows, and execute JurongHealth’s mission; To advance healthcare by synergizing technology, education and research in partnership with patients and the community. Tacera is the only Nurse Call solution on the market that delivers VoIP Internet Protocol to the patient’s bedside, providing the foundation for future products and services using internet-based protocols.
Superior flexibility with a scalable solution
A key benefit of the Tacera solution is its seamless integration as the trigger component of the Integrated Code Blue System that delivers the fastest Code Blue rapid response of any hospital in Singapore. The time from the initial code blue trigger to when an Intensive Care Specialist arrives to treat a patient has been reduced from 7-10 minutes to 2.6-2.8 minutes, which means the patient is treated within the “Golden 5 Minutes͟,” thereby reducing the risk of hypoxic brain damage and improving chances of a full recovery.
Earlier this year, a media briefing was held to share the results of a study pertaining to JurongHealth’s Code Blue initiative. A first-of-its-kind in Singapore, the initiative was a collective effort by various teams to deploy a variety of rapid response systems, enhanced activation parameters and improved workflows to save lives at Ng Teng Fong General Hospital (NTFGH).
Every second counts
“Since we have deployed the Tacera emergency call system, the risk of sudden cardiac arrest in our hospital has dropped from 1.39 per 1,000 people two years ago to 0.79 per 1,000 people this year, while our occupancy rate during the same period has increased by 21%,” said Dr. Chen Zhijie, director of the Nursing Department of Ng Teng Fong General Hospital. “This is a big improvement.”
The survival rate of patients has also been increased from the original 6.6% to 20%. Seventy percent of patients will have symptoms 6 to 8 hours before cardiac arrest. Once symptoms such as abnormal breathing, heart rhythms and elevated blood pressure are detected, the emergency call system will automatically initiate a call to the Quick Response team. The survival rate of these patients has been increased from the original 42% to more than 70%.
At present, all beds at Ng Teng Fong General Hospital are equipped with a Tacera emergency call button. JurongHealth intends to adopt artificial intelligence technology in the future, which will allow the system to automatically diagnose the patient according to their systems and provide detailed information for the response team to further improve survival rates.
