Staff Recall in Crisis Situations: The University Hospitals of Strasbourg (France) rely on AlarmTILT Emergency

Case Study

Following a call for tenders published in March 2008, the University Hospitals of Strasbourg (HUS) selected AlarmTILT Emergency (www.alarmtilt.com) as their notification management tool in emergency situations, more precisely:
- in case of French red plan (“plan rouge”), to recall all the staff from the Samu67, plus essential partners to the emergency management
- in case of French white plan (“plan blanc”) or any other internal first response alert, to recall the crisis managers, the relevant services, the personnel and the adequate partners

The HUS established clear specifications, after requirements analysis and valuable feedback from their involved departments and hospital professionals.

The major conditions to deliver during the call for tenders were:
- a solution totally hosted outside the HUS, in order not block the telephone lines in place during a recall alert procedure
- a fast implementation of the system, requiring no technical involvement by the HUS, and no interface with their ICT systems
- a stable and resilient platform, having proven itself in similar emergency management implementations, offering latest security standards

Among other competitors AlarmTILT Emergency offered the best answer to the requirements, from the point of view of the features offered, performance and pricing.

After a final decision by HUS management in June 2008, AlarmTILT Emergency was initialised and pre-set, HUS system users were trained as soon as beginning of July. After a brief validation phase with a small group of users, a progressive and scalable deployment is planned.

Dr Jacques Texier (Samu 67) thinks the system in place can help other Samu organisations and hospitals that are looking to improve their internal and external communication ways in emergency situations.