Lone Star Communications acquires CareSight to expand alarm management services for hospital decision makers
Lone Star Communications (LSC)announced the acquisition of CareSight, an alarm analytics-as-a-service company that delivers the information required to help hospitals manage their alarm, alert and notification environments.
Effective immediately, CareSight will operate as a majority-owned division of Lone Star Communications Co.
“I am excited about the powerful synergies between Lone Star and CareSight. The strength of LSC combined with the unparalleled capabilities of CareSight will make it significantly easier for hospital decision-makers to improve safety and operational efficiencies,” says Ray Bailey, Lone Star founder and president. “Emboldened with the right information, hospital management can confidently execute data-driven improvements and accelerate strategic programs.”
“Our team brings over a decade of experience to LSC in the secure extraction of data from various sources, and experience transforming, normalizing, and correlating said data into usable information for different roles. In most environments, 99% of clinically relevant data is thrown away," said CareSight Founder Kenny Schiff says. “Our solution leverages this data to support everything from staff planning to forensic research.”
In today’s hospital environments, nursing teams experience hundreds of alarms, alerts, and notifications on every shift. This “alarm overload” creates safety issues, hampers nurse-patient relationships, and impacts the efficiency of operations.
It also contributes to nursing stress and morale issues, creating retention problems for hospitals. CareSight enables nursing and hospital quality teams to identify easy fixes and reduce the number of false and self-correcting alarms. Escalation paths can be adjusted to improve response times. Staff performance can be monitored to balance the workload appropriately, and rounding processes can be optimized for patient satisfaction and safety.
For fast deployment, the CareSight solution uses a cloud-based approach. Designed with security in mind, CareSight filters out patient information before transmission to the cloud for analysis. Management has access to comprehensive, multi-source information via daily reports and the ability to model the impact of potential operational changes to assist management in making quick and confident decisions.
“The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced how essential data-driven decision-making is to hospitals,” according to Donna Montgomery, chief clinical informatics officer for LSC. “CareSight supercharges our ability to unlock hidden insights from disparate systems like nurse calls, patient monitoring, infant security, RTLS, mobile communications, patient engagement, MDI, and middleware platforms. Having a view across all sources enables faster and better decision-making by nursing and hospital management.”
CareSight brings an experienced team of clinical and data science specialists to support alarm committees and management teams at an impressive list of successful hospital groups, including Northwell Health, MedStar Health, Yale New Haven Health, and the University of Chicago Medical Center.
All current and future LSC customers will have the opportunity to include CareSight in their respective solutions. Current CareSight customers will continue to receive the same quality services moving forward. The CareSight solution will also be available through a network of nurse call or specialized integrators for areas outside of Lone Star Communications’ coverage.
