Digital health checkup: critical messaging
Critical messaging is perhaps the most vital operational aspect of delivering healthcare.
For decades, innovative technologies have elevated how clinicians communicate and collaborate.
This article is the first in a new series from Ikonix Technology, checking up on digital health topics in 2025.
“When critical information emerges or there is a risk to patient care, timely communication of this information to the appropriate person(s) is essential to ensuring patient safety and delivery of the right care.”
Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC)
What is critical messaging in digital health?
What is critical information?
In essence, critical information is anything that requires a time-sensitive response. These will necessarily change depending on environment and circumstances.
For non-clinical roles within a hospital, critical information includes Code Black (threat of or actual violence) or Red (fire or immediate safety concern) and other emergencies or security events.
There are also Codes yellow, orange, grey, purple or brown, covering everything from missing persons (patient elopement) to external threats of harm to the facility.
Hospital security, operations, and support personnel have a variety of types of critical events for which they must plan responses, to ensure continuous delivery of care by their clinical colleagues.
Critical messaging in clinical settings.
In a dynamic clinical setting, there are many time-sensitive pieces of information being shared. First and foremost, Code Blues. This requires immediate intervention for patient lives.
Further, the ACSQHC (the Commission) identifies several critical occasions in clinical communication:
- Changes in a patient’s condition, such as unexpected deterioration or development of complications, both physical and psychological;
- New or previously missed diagnostic or test results requiring a change to care;
- Errors in diagnosis;
- Predetermined alerts and triggers, such as from other digital health or monitoring solutions; and
- Follow-up communication from diagnostic specialists or other consulting physicians.
Finding the right message recipient.
Critical information needs to find the right recipient to be useful. The Commission explains that this is the clinician or care team that can make decisions about a patient – those who are empowered to act on the content of that information.
To ensure critical communication turns into patient benefit, healthcare organisations need to have the processes and tools in place to identify and locate the right personnel.
Such mechanisms also need to be able to be used in a timely manner to ensure a quick response. In some instances that could be by automating workflows or offering escalating means of conveying information by providing multiple avenues of communication – email for less urgent missives, up to paging to have the message received in seconds.
Closing the loop in critical communication.
When developing critical communication procedures, the Commission draws specific attention to ‘closed-loop communication’. This is where the sender of the message knows that their information has been received and will generate a response.
Some communications don’t support instant two-way sharing, such as paging, email or paper notes. This means developing and coaching responder habits – calling switch or the sender within specific timeframes.
In communication apps, however, the loop can be closed more readily, with options such as read receipts or quick-response actions and instant text replies.
How can you manage critical messaging for complex environments?
At the core what Ikonix Technology does is capture data from any source—human or system—and deliver it to where it needs to be, in a timely manner. That sets the benchmark in critical messaging.
Data from any source to any destination.
Timely dispatch and automation workflows.
Received by the appropriate contact.
Data sources and destinations.
Directing traffic third-party hardware or software systems, Ikonix Messenger is the Message Integration Engine. This is the middleware that powers hospital communication. We ingest data from clinical and operational system, from blood and pharmacy fridges to the fire and smoke detection systems.
This data is then swiftly processed by Messenger and then transmitted where it needs to be. Importantly for critical collaboration, this system underpins human to human communication. A clinician can send pages from any landline, switchboard can find the on-call specialist, or maintenance team members can discuss an issue in a group message on Ikonix Connect.
By bringing in data from automated and human sources, the Suite ensures critical messaging reliability.
Timely dispatch of information.
As mentioned, messages can come in from all manner of sources, both system and person.
This information then needs to be broadcast back out to its intended recipient, without delay. By implementing server side support either on-premises or in reputable cloud environments, the systems are supported to deliver fast messages.
Mobile phone cells can become burdened by large amounts of traffic, which undermines SMS or mobile telephony as a critical communication solution. Ikonix Technology deploys radio paging, including via Distributed Antenna Systems throughout brand new hospital buildings.
Networks such as the Health Interior Radio Paging Network (HIRPN) in NSW and Health Paging Service (HPS) in SA use paging to receive critical information in just seconds, further supported by advanced prioritisation, so the most vital messages are sent first.
The appropriate recipient.
The final step in the chain of critical messaging is accessing the right person. In a hospital which might have hundreds of people on-site, or across a network with tens of thousands of employees, this can become a significant task.
By integrating both switchboard operations (via Ikonix WebConnect) and mobile/frontline staff (with Ikonix Connect) with your full organisational directory, searching becomes that much simpler.
However, in such complex organisations, it’s a frequent occurrence that the message sender may not know the specific person they need – a specialist consultant on-call could change four times a day. Using role-based messaging the team can find the person by the skills they need to access and be routed to the best possible contact.
The on-call teams can hand the roles between them either virtually, or by changing profile in a shared phone they hand off between shifts. This ensures unbroken, accessible coverage for all critical messages.
Carlo Reveruzzi
Director
As a Director, Carlo is the chief contact supporting leaders across multiple healthcare networks to ensure they get the most out of their critical messaging platforms.