Consistently voted one of the top 100 hospitals in the US, Intermountain Dixie Regional Medical Center is one of the largest and most progressive health care facilities in the Southern Utah and Nevada region. Its sprawling campus is home to a number of state-of-the-art, high tech laboratory and surgical facilities, staffed by some of the best professionals in the business.
Recently, the hospital installed new CI-BUSS communications systems from Yorba Linda, CA-based Tech Works in several of their Cardiac Catheterization lab facilities. Randy Turek of Dixie’s Cardiology Department explains the challenges of communicating within a sterile facility.
“The doctors inside the clean rooms need to be able to communicate with staff outside the glass, and for quite some time, that communication was via a hanging microphone,” says Turek. “The sound quality was terrible. The rooms themselves are a very boomy, reflective environment, with flat walls, vinyl floors, and plenty of glass, so intelligibility is poor to begin with. Communication basically consisted of a lot of yelling back and forth.”
The CI-BUSS system provided the doctors with the flexibility of using lightweight headsets, desktop or ceiling mounted microphones, with powerful digital signal processing and automatic level control for clean, intelligible, hands-free communication.
“We had tried a number of different solutions, and when we looked around at other facilities to see what they were using, we realized that everyone was having the same issues,” Turek observes. “Everyone was putting together systems with different components from different manufacturers, and the results were never quite as good as they could be. The CI-BUSS system was the first we found that was specifically designed for this purpose. We were able to configure the entire system and choose the components we needed for each application.”
With the CI-BUSS system in place, doctors are now able to communicate to staff in normal conversational tones. That has its own advantages, says Turek. “We found that after we switched to the CI-BUSS, the satisfaction levels in our patient care environment went up. Patients were happy we were no longer yelling back and forth.”
Press Release: CI-BUSS Brings Clear Sound to Dixie Regional Medical Center (PDF)