How Everbridge supports healing and emergency response at Hackensack Meridian Health

Hackensack Meridian Health, guided by Scott Skrivanek, Network Director of Emergency Management, uses Everbridge to create a safer, quieter, and more healing-focused environment across its 18 hospitals and 600 locations. By streamlining critical communications for medical emergencies and unexpected events like earthquakes, Everbridge helps protect over 36,000 employees and thousands of patients daily, ensuring swift responses and improved patient care. Discover how this technology fosters both safety and healing.

[00:07.0]
In health care, which is my industry. We have a lot of different use cases for the use of Everbridge, because we not only have to protect our 30,000+ employees, but also our daily inpatient count of three to 4,000 patients, and all of the people who come to all of our health care locations.

[00:29.3]
So we need to not only be able to dispatch or, respond to power outages, or floods, and things like that, but we also respond to medical emergencies within the hospital. And Everbridge has really helped us do that, and be able to send timely messaging out, to respond to cardiac arrests, patients who are having strokes or having significant medical emergencies in the hospital.

[00:59.5]
When we first started as a network, which was in 2016, it was truly like the Wild West. Everybody kind of did their own thing, and hospitals are very noisy places to begin with, and we would, send messages over intercoms and things like that hundreds of times a day.

[01:21.1]
Everbridge has allowed us to do a lot of that dispatching, and a lot of that response to emergencies, without having to make overhead announcements as much. So it leads to a much better, healing process in the hospital, because the hospital is now quieter, because we’ve moved most of our critical communications over to using Everbridge.

[01:49.4]
So last year, something that doesn’t happen in New Jersey very often, we had an earthquake that was upwards of 3 to 4 on the Richter scale. Doesn’t happen. So there was a lot of, uneasiness amongst our team members, and Everbridge allowed us to respond to that by sending out multitudes of messages.

[02:15.5]
We sent damage assessments to all our facilities teams. We have 18 hospitals, 600 locations, so we have to be able to very quickly, assess any damage or anything like that. So we were able to do that. We sent Everbridge messages to all our ops teams at all our hospitals to see if there were other impacts to operations.

[02:37.6]
And then we actually were able to send to all 36,000 of our employees a tip on how to respond to the wake of an earthquake. So we were able to help them with that personal, response to the event.

[02:56.4]
So Everbridge was an integral part of that whole thing. Luckily, there wasn’t a lot of damage or, any damage really. But just being able to do that very quickly was pretty impressive.