Serving Southwestern Connecticut and Westchester County, New York, St. Vincent’s Medical Center Bridgeport, Connecticut is a modern, 397-bed acute-care hospital offering more than 50 specialty and subspecialty medical and surgical disciplines. With 450 physicians on its medical staff, the medical center employs more than 1,800 people.

The TPC/St. Vincent’s relationship is long and trusting, dating back to the construction of the new medical center itself in the mid 1970’s and continuing through the hospitals’ new $45 million expansion. In a series of related projects beginning in 1996, TPC has worked hand in hand in hand with SVHS’s Project Management team to deliver new life safety and communication solutions that meet the medical center’s growing needs.

Starting with the replacement/consolidation of the outdated life safety platform, TPC and the St. Vincent’s team brought the hospital’s critical fire alarm, smoke detection and monitoring equipment to a level appropriate for a facility of its size and complexity using EST’s network-based platform. This included key integration with the Landis Staefa HVAC systems.

Next the TPC/St. Vincent’s team worked to replace the facility’s aging nurse/patient communication system (nurse call). Using Rauland-Borg’s state-of-the-art Responder® IV platform, TPC delivered a quieter communication solution that integrated Nortel Companion wireless PCS telephones. In 2005 this solutions was expanded to include a combination of Vocera handsfree communicators and Nortel IP handsets. The solution has minimized the need for overhead paging by passing calls and information from patients directly to their caregivers.

Responder is powerful in its reach, working across the many different parts of the facility. The Responder IV consoles intelligently route patient calls based on priority and type and succinctly pass along to caregivers important patient information, regardless of where they may be in the facility. Management software gives adminstrators key quality of care indicators like response time, which allows St. Vincent’s to deliver the award-winning level of service it is known for.

With over two decades of service at St. Vincent’s TPC has developed the kind of intimate system-wide knowledge that allows us to be both a trusted advisor and key adjunct. “TPC knows our life safety and nurse call infastructure as well as we do,” says Keith Giannone, St. Vincent’s Supervisor of Project Management. “They know what’s in the walls, how our users use the systems and take, good care of us.”